Vox Populi
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Barbara Hamby: Nose
I am trying on an especially evil-looking pair of shoes
when the shopgirl points to the middle of her face and says,
“This is called what?” For a moment I draw a blank as I search
my mind for the Italian word for snoot, schnozzola, beak,
but when “il naso” finally surfaces, I realize
that she is Italian and probably knows the Italian word
for nose, so what she wants is the English,
which is relatively easy for me, so I say, “Nose.”
“Nose,” she replies, smiling. “You have a beautiful nose.”
I am looking at the shoes on my feet. I have dangerous feet,
especially in these particular shoes, but my nose
is rather white bread, too much like my skinflint grandmother’s
for me to ever be entirely ecstatic about it,
and this girl’s is spectacular, an aquiline viaduct
spanning the interval from her eyes to her delicious lips.
A friend once told me, “My sister paid $2,000
for a nose like yours, a perfect shiksa nose,
but it ending up looking like Bob Hope’s.”
Suddenly, I feel as if I have no nose, like Gogol’s Kovelev
riding around St. Petersburg looking for his proboscis.
What is a nose? Obviously not simply a smeller, sniffer,
or a mere searcher out of olfactory sensation,
but something more–an aesthetic appendage to the facial
construction, a slope from brow to philtrum,
with symmetrical phalanges. Aren’t I precise, who knows
nothing about having an unsatisfactory nose, or ever thinking
about it for one second? Perhaps my offending part
is somewhere else, or am I as hapless as Gogol’s hero–
with too little nose for my purposes, like Miss Ruby Diamond,
the richest woman in my town, who lost her nose to cancer,
and had two counterfeits, one lifelike and the other
a simple plastic flap to hide the scar of ninety years.
A nose is a nose is a nose is a nose,
Gertrude Stein did not say and why would she
as it is obviously untrue? Though each nose is an island
in the sea of the face, sticking out in a more or less
inadequate fashion. Like Cyrano, I marshal my couplets,
ragtag though they be, to celebrate all noses unloved,
those lost to disease or, like Kovelev’s, inadvertently
misplaced, and the nose of the shopgirl on the Via Roma
in Firenze, her eyes red from either smoking pot or heartbreak
and the many other indignities gathered like humps on our backs,
which we touch for luck, as if floods, bombings, murders
could only happen to others who are beautiful and pure.
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, I adore these “ragtag couplets”!
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Thanks for this — which reminded me of this YouTube version of Shostakovich ballet “The Nose” . . . live performance by actors & the Moscow Chamber Opera Theatre Chorus — a trip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muxgjshs6MY
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Love this! Listened to some of it and will return to it later. Thanks, Mike!!!
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Have you seen the Met HD version with sets by William Kentridge? It’s amazing.
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What absurd fun that Shostakovich!
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When I grow up I want to be able to write like that!
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A lovely olfactory ode, and I didn’t know that fact about Ruby Diamond!
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Neither did I, Marty!
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Nosing around Vox Popoli, I happen upon this poem of Barbara’s. No one else quite has the flair for this kind of subject, discovering and evoking the aroma of significance sniffed out in Via Roma, Firenze. Well perhaps it could be done by Publius Ovidius Naso. (The name of this magazine justifies recourse to classical references.) But if not by him or by Barbara, God only nose who could have managed it so smoothly.
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Your comment wins by a nose, Alfred.
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A delight!
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yes, it is.
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Dang, I didn’t know how desperately I needed to read a poem by Barbara Hamby today. Thank you!
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She is great, isn’t she?
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Just a little frivolity to break the muzzle velocity of the big world. Love to you, Barbara.
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Apologies in advance for this therapeutic response: A year ago a man and his wife sat down with me at a party. The man started talking about my wife who had died 6 years before. He told me and his wife, that Pam had the most erotic nose he had ever seen, and he got turned on looking at it. As he said this he stared heavenward with a beatific smile. The woman had horror appear on her face. I was too gobsmacked to reply. Later I realized that Pam had told me several times she hated her nose. I realized if this nose-man had told it to her of its power over him, she would have been amused. But the woman who got to hear this, appeared to be girding herself to do battle over that nose. It left me hyperaware of nosey comments. What can you do about crazy stuff like this? I vowed to never talk to the guy again.
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That’s a poem handed to you on a silver platter. I’m going to steal that story if you don’t use it. Beware!
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Thanks for your kind reply, Barbara. I just read another amazing poem of yours entitled ode to the lost luggage warehouse at the rome airport. One image from your ode made the transition between your two poems:… a few seats down/ a child screams, hysterical with fatigue,/ and you see his face with its sticky impasto of snot,/ candy and tears, and you think of all your losses… There you get nose, mouth, eyes and your ears all in one place.
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So wonderful for this morning return from the Great Basin of NV and Utah. The delicacies I saw along the way in the morning excursion are akin to this most fabulous writer’s images and notions in her poem. I feel in either case as if I’ve just visited a fabulous bakery and am brushing a remaining bit of powdered confection from my nose and woolen waist-coat. It’s possible to get beauty all over you when it comes in such excess.
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Barbara is great, isn’t she?
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The Hamby Boulangerie on the rue de whipped cream.
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“A nose is a nose is a nose is a nose,
Gertrude Stein did not say and why would she
as it is obviously untrue? Though each nose is an island
in the sea of the face, sticking out …”
What a relief, even though we all know war is the rite of passage our world is currently enduring, and we all know “floods, bombings, murders / could only happen to others who are beautiful and pure…”
and and and…
Thank you Barbara Hamby and thank you Michael. I’m breathing again…
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Thanks, Noelle. I love Barbara Hamby’s poems for their originality, wit and music.
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As do I! And the tone — Barbara is so good at mastering tone and its subtle variations!
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