Vox Populi
A curated webspace for Poetry, Politics, and Nature. Over 15,000 daily subscribers. Over 7,000 archived posts.
Barbara Hamby: The Tawdry Masks of Women
Every bus ride is theater, giddy schoolgirls trying on the tawdry masks of women, flirting with my nephew, red and green lights, shop windows piled high, gold glistered skeletal mannequins in slips of iridescent silk. At night in the wind blowing over the Pont Marie I hear Camille Claudel crying from the walls of her studio, and two days before Christmas Elliot and I stand miraculously alone before La Gioconde, follow her eyes, cracked surface of her skin like softest sand before the deep water of her mouth, and later standing in the cold our Buddhist gardienne Nadine tells me in rapid-fire French that in all things she tries to remain neutral, neutre, neutre, neutre, the only word finally I understand in the barrage tumbling out of her mouth like a waterfall, but I can’t be neutral, passion welling up in my heart for the exhausted maids, dapper men in berets, the madwoman on the PC bus, screaming, Salope, salope, as she descends at the Pont d’Ivry and everyone on the bus looking at each other, Whore? Who’s the whore here? or the chic older woman, leather pants baggy on her skinny shanks, reading a battered paperback Rimbaud as we take the bus to see Pasolini’s Canterbury Tales, the master himself as Chaucer, spinning his ribald stories of human folly, each one a mirror, and when I see myself in bus windows or store glass, the shock never wears off, for I recognize myself and see a stranger at the same time, because the minutes are racing by at the speed of light, and I am saying goodbye to Paris, to everyone, myself most of all, watching her disappear down the rue Jeanne d’Arc, and what can she possibly be thinking as she walks to the movies in the middle of this afternoon of her life?
“The Tawdry Masks of Women” from Babel. Copyright © 2004 by Barbara Hamby Pitt, 2004). Used by permission of the author and the University of Pittsburgh Press. Barbara Hamby was born in New Orleans and raised in Honolulu. She is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Holoholo (2021). She has also edited an anthology of poems, Seriously Funny (Georgia, 2009), with her husband David Kirby. She teaches at Florida State University where she is Distinguished University Scholar.
Vox Populi 
Incredibly moving. Reminds me of Sara Maclay’s book “Whore.”
LikeLike
Thanks, Matthew.
M. Michael Simms https://www.michaelsimms.info https://www.michaelsimms.info/
Author of Bicycles of the Gods https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09ZYTM9J5/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i1 Author of Nightjar https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1933974435/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i2 Author of American Ash https://www.amazon.com/American-Ash-Poems-Michael-Simms/dp/1933974397/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2PC9VWO127ZSF&dchild=1&keywords=american+ash+by+michael+simms&qid=1593969710&s=books&sprefix=American+ash,aps,133&sr=1-1 Editor of Vox Populi https://voxpopulisphere.com/
>
LikeLike
Barbara is one of the best around
>
LikeLike
Indeed, she is. Thanks, Rick.
>
LikeLike
What finery of words, mastery of metaphor!
Barbara—you are something!
LikeLike
Thanks, Sean.
>
LikeLike