Vox Populi
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Barbara Hamby: St. Clare’s Underwear
You can see why men are such monsters when you look
at a woman’s body, Devonshire creamy from a bath,
or just the general curviness of the whole design. Then
there’s your average man, hirsute and raging with testosterone,
Godzilla incarnato, King Kong with big feet, Frankenstein
hovering over some delectable damsel with skin like fresh pastry.
So you can see why St. Clare threw in her lot with St. Francis,
a nice guy, good with animals, although there were rumors.
But aren’t there always? In Italian, the word for noise is rumore,
which is what gossip is, though why women should be thought
more inclined to tittle-tattle than men is a mystery to me,
but not something I was thinking about one evening in Florence
as my husband and I strolled along the Lungarno Soderini
and in the Piazza Cestello happened upon a theater presenting
Goldoni’s The Gossip of Women, though after one act I felt
that it could have as easily been called The Foppery of Men.
My dear, the prancing and smirking that transpired,
and in a country known for its machismo. When the young lover
puckered his carmine lips, the men in the audience
were making a noise that sounded for all the world like laughter,
though one can never be certain. I learned something that night,
though exactly what, I’m not sure, and my education continued
in Assisi where we saw glass cases with the clothes of St. Francis
and St. Clare, sandals and sackcloth, though Clare’s case
contained what looked like a rough slip or chemise. “St. Clare’s
underwear,” I cried with such happiness to my husband,
but at that point he was sick of me and my non-Catholic
lack of respect for everything he no longer holds dear.
In Italy you are either cattolico or acattolico, which, I imagine,
makes Anglicans and Four-Square Gospel Pentecostals
rather uneasy bed partners, as, I suppose, hermaphrodites
and transsexuals are made anxious by the words “woman”
and “man.” I like to think of Kierkegaard’s idea of the natural home
of despair being in the “heart of happiness,” which could mean
any number of things, such as black is not black or even white,
or that we are all as confused as Dracula, dreaming
of a local milkmaid, her C-cup, coarse lingerie, ruddy cheeks,
and the blood, of course, always the blood.
From On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems (Pitt, 2014). Included in Vox Populi by permission of the author and the University of Pittsburgh Press
Barbara Hamby is the author of many collections of poetry. She and her husband David Kirby edited the poetry anthology Seriously Funny. She teaches at Florida State University where she is distinguished university scholar.
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What a merry poem! 💗
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What an upper and so delightful. Every word chosen deliberately
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Every time I (re-)encounter a Hamby poem, I understand what poetry’s all about. Brilliant, as ever.
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Wonderful! Enjoy Florence!
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I loved the rambling, rolling cadence/diction here—the tour guide of my dreams!
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Exactly, she’s a tour guide doing backflips while explaining the nature of god and man.
>
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What an absolutely astonishing, deep, funny, lovely poem. I am still giggling and shall share it immediately on my FB page. Yay, Barbara Hamby, you are a genius!
“but at that point he was sick of me and my non-Catholic
lack of respect for everything he no longer holds dear.”
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Yes, I was about to quote that one 🤣
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Thanks so much, Rosemary. This line is a litotes, my absolutely favorite rhetorical device. It is an ironic understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of its contrary. (I know. I have to look it up every time.) Jane Austen is a master of this, as in Mrs. Bennett saying at the end of Pride and Prejudice, “Oh, Jane, I knew you could not be so beautiful for nothing.” There is also one earlier when Elizabeth and her aunt and uncle have dined at Pemberly, and Miss Bingley is ragging on Elizabeth, and Darcy shuts her up by saying how beautiful Elizabeth is, and Austen writes, “Miss Bingley had the pleasure of hearing what could cause no one pain but herself.”
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There I was copying this couplet to quote in my comments, then…no…this one rather, but then this one’s also **SO** good, and it’d be silly to copy and paste the whole blessèd poem, right? So, as a fervent acattolico, all I want to say is Bless You, poet — you are my “heart of happiness,” & pure delight!
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Barbara Hamby is a genius, a funny learned word-acrobat.
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such a pleasurable guide to such beauty! To think I was eating Pizza and sipping handmade beer in downtown Tallahassee sitting between those two—the “Catolica” and la Esposa—and now this magic carpet of words…that underwear…
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This line is something that I aspire to and can’t often pull off–a rhetorical device called a litotes, an ironic understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of its contrary. Jane Austen is a master of this, as in Mrs. Bennett saying at the end of Pride and Prejudice, “Oh, Jane, I knew you could not be so beautiful for nothing.”
This poem is from my first book, and I couldn’t really believe I came up with that line.
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