Vox Populi
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Barbara Hamby: 17 Dollars
That’s how much the man who owned DuBey’s gave me
for my books that time you insisted
they were taking up space and we needed the money.
We were poor, sure—you a painter,
me a student—but 17 dollars? I remember looking at it—
a ten, a five, and two ones—and thinking
how little it was compared to the cardboard box
you’d lugged into the store that afternoon,
all the days and nights those people—Russian aristocrats,
English ladies, Southern dingbats, Irish wild men—
taught me how to be human: flawed, yes, but with aspirations
of divinity. Where were Prince Myshkin,
Dorothea Brooke, Hazel Motes, Stephen Dedalus?
We could maybe buy groceries for a week
or go to the café down the street for dinner or lunch,
but how could I get by without my Borges
or Wuthering Heights? When I think back on that day,
that’s when my heart hardened in my chest
like a walnut gone bad, so when another man
told me he loved me, I looked at him
and didn’t ask myself would he love me forever
but would he love my piles of books?
When they began to grow by the bed, teeter on every table,
and topple to the floor, would his mouth
become thin and his voice rise like an accountant’s
with a ledger? I handed you the money
and walked away. You ran to catch up,
said, “We can take it back,” but I felt
like the poor mother who has given her child
to the rich couple because they can buy her
frilly dresses, give her piano lessons, send her to fancy schools.
I couldn’t take care of my Jane Eyre,
Molly Bloom, Anna Karenina, but maybe someone else could.
Even now I go to my shelves to look for The Trial
or The Day of the Locust or Thus Spake Zarathustra,
and when I can’t find them, I know
they were in that box. What did we do after? Walk home,
eat dinner at the cheap Chinese place,
where you picked the shrimp out of eggrolls and asked,
“Is that pork? It tastes like pork.” Later
a French couple bought the building, ripped out the red silk
dragons, the lanterns with gold tassels
and turned it into the bistro my new husband and I went to
most weekends when we were first married,
where I learned to drink wine, eat escargots and bitter greens.
Now it’s the parking lot of the federal courthouse,
and I can’t drink red wine without sneezing. Why did I keep
The Manifestos of Surrealism, which I haven’t opened
in thirty years? Where are The Moviegoer, Nightwood,
Tender Buttons, Wise Blood? Years later,
both married to other people, you said you were sorry
for making me sell those books. We were standing outside
your studio in Chicago. It was summer and you were holding
your daughter’s hand, and I said it was nothing,
but even that day long ago I knew it was everything and it was.
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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Oh, how I miss books I’ve sold, given away, loaned . . . what a wonderful poem!
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Isn’t it, though?
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😂our second date was to Hollywood to see the Martian Chronicles. We met Ray Bradbury there and on two other occasions. When we went to an Ann Rice signing, my very young son spoke out in a loud, innocent, voice, “Do vampires suck anything besides blood?” That was probably at A change of Hobbit bookstore and the whole place cracked up.
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Hahahaha
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My late husband and I considered it a hot date to go to a book signing or used book store and then go out to dinner. Good times!
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Hahahaha. You are describing Eva and me…
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my late wife and I considered it a hot date, too. Her hottest date of this sort was one reading by Robert Bly, when he wore a grotesque Richard Nixon mask. She said every poet should read with a Richard Nixon mask on, to give the listeners “great glee.” I never wore one for any hot moments of any sort, however.
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Perfect for Banned Books Week
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Yep
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Being a retired librarian who loved books as a profession, and even taught students how to develop their own unique ways to organize them, I now have them disorganized in every room of my house, and occasionally, in a swirl of madness, “weed a couple.” So the poem speaks to me on that level. But also, in how it moves outward into communication breakdowns with loved ones, so well explored, including in the ways other commenters here have mentioned: the urge of a loved one to improve life by simply going to a used bookstore to get rid of excess literary baggage. The damage, regrets, even anger spiking around those experiences. Smiles along the way in the poem, but no laughs for me. My two spouses were bookies too, so no hassles from any of us. Time to read one.
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Well-said, Jim. I’m fortunate to be married to a “bookie” as well.
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Wish you were closer to help me rehome my precious books. I fear the old science fiction paperbacks might be trashed.
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Actually this boyfriend was a great reader, but he didn’t like stuff. I don’t know what it is, but I take comfort in just seeing books I’ve read on the shelf. They’re like old friends.
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I have built an ADU in my son’s backyard. I don’t plan to move until I have to, but years ago I estimated I had 7000 books and gave away or sold many, many boxes of them. Today I must have at least 7000 books though I still give the library store boxes and boxes of them. They multiply.
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How will I ever move to that tiny place?
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Maybe you can build a house for them!
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Hahaha. They do seem to multiply.
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I have a pair of friends who are downsizing their books before a move from their large house. They find that they agree on half, but part of their solution is to let me paw through the ones in question, and haul off boxes of them, mostly mysteries. The expectation, perhaps, is that I will hoard them so that if they ever want them back, they can have them again. I foil that, by putting many in Little Free Libraries dotting the neighborhood.
Your method may work too.
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Oh, yesssss. How we live with our flawed friends, how we revisit, how our worlds are enlarged by their lives that enter ours. This poem hit home and left me deeply saddened. I also had to giggled, because now it’s the other way around. My secon husband let’s ‘mushrooms’ of books grow everywhere. He also knows where very book is. (More or less.) Oh, how I understand this. We just need a bigger place.
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lets
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We are lucky if we live with a person who loves books as much as we do. Every room of our house, even the bathrooms, are full of books. What a blessing.
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oh our books–how they shape us, and i love how we live in this poem how strong and vital our literary relationships can be.
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Oh our books…
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Yep, definite grounds for desertion!
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Oh, how deeply I understand this beautiful true poem!
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This beautiful true poem…
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One home run after another. You put Ohtani to shame!
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The HEART, the beautiful HEART in all of Barbara’s poems — and how I love this one! (The poem & her heart!)
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Yes…. The heart of the poet and the poem.
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You’re the one with the beautiful heart, Laure-Anne.
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Such a great poem Barbara, such a wonderful life. I don’t envy many other’s but I think you’ve done quite a job of being in this world, (you and that lively fellow you’ve spent it with) and spoken of—so magically, beautifully, in your “metier”—such as here. You make me happy today.
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Barbara Hamby is a wonderful poet! I found myself grieving too.
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Yes, it is a sad and funny poem, isn’t it?
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Interestingly, I did not find it at all funny.
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Barbara’s language is so lively and original, it often seems funny to me even when her subject is sad.
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This poem hits home hard! Thank you so much for sharing it.
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I love Barbara Hamby’s poems!
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Yes, I’ve ordered several books, she’s someone I like to read again and again.
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