Vox Populi
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Barbara Hamby: Ode to Hardware Stores
Where have all the hardware stores gone—dusty, sixty-watt
warrens with wood floors, cracked linoleum,
poured concrete painted blood red? Where are Eppes, Terry Rosa,
Yon’s, Flint—low buildings on South Monroe,
Eighth Avenue, Gaines Street with their scent of paint thinner,
pesticides, plastic hoses coiled like serpents
in a garden paradisal with screws in buckets or bins
against a brick wall with hand-lettered signs
in ball-point pen—Carriage screws, two dozen for fifty cents—
long vicious dry-wall screws, thick wood screws
like peasants digging potatoes in fields, thin elegant trim
screws—New York dames at a backwoods hick
Sunday School picnic. O universal clevis pins, seven holes
in the shank, like the seven deadly sins.
Where are the men—Mr. Franks, Mr. Piggot, Tyrone, Hank,
Ralph—sunburnt with stomachs and no asses,
men who knew the mythology of nails, Zeuses enthroned
on an Olympus of weak coffee, bad haircuts,
and tin cans of galvanized casing nails, sinker nails, brads,
20-penny common nails, duplex head nails, flooring nails
like railroad spikes, finish nails, fence staples, cotter pins,
roofing nails—flat-headed as Floyd Crawford,
who lived next door to you for years but would never say hi
or make eye contact. What a career in hardware
he could have had, his blue-black hair slicked back with brilliantine,
rolling a toothpick between his teeth while sorting
screw eyes and carpet tacks. Where are the hardware stores,
open Monday through Friday, Saturday till two?
No night hours here, like physicists their universe mathematical
and pure in its way: dinner at six, Rawhide at eight,
lights out at ten, kiss in the dark, up at five for the sub-atomic world
of toggle bolts, cap screws, hinch-pin clips, split-lock
washers. And the tools—saws, rakes, wrenches, ratchets, drills,
chisels, and hose heads, hose couplings, sandpaper
(garnet, production, wet or dry), hinges, wire nails, caulk, nuts,
lag screws, pulleys, vise grips, hexbolts, fender washers,
all in a primordial stew of laconic talk about football, baseball,
who’ll start for the Dodgers, St. Louis, the Phillies,
the Cubs? Walk around the block today and see their ghosts:
abandoned lots, graffitti’d windows, and tacked
to backroom walls, pin-up calendars almost decorous
in our porn-riddled galaxy of Walmarts, Seven-Elevens,
stripmalls like strip mines or a carrion bird’s curved beak
gobbling farms, meadows, wildflowers, drowsy afternoons
of nothing to do but watch dust motes dance through a streak
of sunlight in a darkened room. If there’s a second coming,
I want angels called Lem, Nelson, Rodney, and Cletis gathered
around a bin of nails, their silence like hosannahs,
hallelujahs, amens swelling from cinderblock cathedrals drowning
our cries of bigger, faster, more, more, more.
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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I went to the hardware store in Mayville, NY to get lids for canning jars. You can see Chautauqua Lake from there and, in addition to canning supplies, they have “casing nails, sinker nails, brads,
20-penny common nails, duplex head nails, flooring nails
like railroad spikes, finish nails, fence staples, cotter pins,
roofing nails—flat-headed as Floyd Crawford,
who lived next door to you for years but would never say hi
or make eye contact…” The hardware store guy knows where everything is, directed me to the lids and helped me when I chose the wrong ones. I told him I’d just read a poem about a hardware store. He googled it and said he was going to print it out and post it at the store. So now, you can see the lake, get all these things AND read Barbara Hamby’s perfect ode.
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Lovely, Beth. Thank you. I’ve never thought of hardware stores as a distributor of poetry, but there you go…
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What a fabulous ode! Another poem knocked out of the park, Barbara❤️
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English poets of the Renaissance were wont to produce catalogues of flowers. Barbara, who should be Tallahassee’s poet laureate, has produced a catalogue of hardware. Most of the old-style hardware stores have been swallowed up by Home Depot and Lowe’s, but last week I got a key duplicated at one on Inman Square here in Cambridge. Anyway, here is an original poem delivered to us by several types of software, which I could try to catalogue but won’t.
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Thanks, Alfred. Well-said, as always.
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My friend Bill read the poem, and said he could once again feel the prick of the nails when he pulled them out of the barrel. He also mentioned that when he visited a big box store to see if they sold sawhorses, the young sales people had never heard of such a thing, so he drew them a picture. No, they didn’t have one. The poem, for me, is a wizardry of merging strong imagery with rhetorical power, to give us such a grand time reading it. Nostalgia buzzing with Hamby’s diction. A sensory rush in our hollowed times.
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Lovely response to the poem, Jim. Thank you.
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Oh, Barbara, what a wonderful poem. Another Barbara Hamby gem. Forgive me for posting this link to an old English comedy show: it links in so perfectly with your poem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CmaLgxLDE0
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Every time I read a Barbara Hamby poem on VP I want to praise whatever led me to Michael’s blog. (Of course that happens with a lot of other poems, too, but this was so delightful)
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Barbara Hamby, Barbara Huntington, Barbara Crooker. I’ve been blessed with an ecstasy of larks.
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Last time I was in Julian, California, they still had a hardware store and I loved the scent and the bins, so different from our Home Depot—oh and the horse blankets and percolators ( Julian is a mountain town).
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I love this so much. Five Corners near our new place on Queen Anne Hill is still like this, a polyphonic mélange of stuff floor to ceiling and spilling out the front door. This is perfect!
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What an ODE! And Luray Gross is right: a celebration of nouns — and things too! I have no idea what fender washers are, or hinch-pin clips for that matter, but how I loved the little hardware store in Brussels — and its oil & grease & rust smell. How Barbara Hamby always, always takes the reader in the million “worlds in this world “(I’m slightly quoting Paul Eluard here) What mysteries and magic and joy and curiosities in her poems!
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What a celebration of nouns! Read the whole delicious poem aloud for my Pittsburgh-born husband so we could share the delight and remember Maddens on Mill Street in the town where our children were born.
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Very cool!
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This is my very favorite Barbara Hamby poem! I’ve read it many times over the years, and enjoyed it anew this morning. Such a wonderful tribute to “men who knew the mythology of nails” and to America in the time before big box stores.
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I love this poem as well, Christine.
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Such a perfect expression of what’s gone missing from Middle America! Ours was called King’s Ideal Supply, where you’d go get a handle replaced for your axe, shovel or hoe. The saints were all there, along with rope and chain, fence gloves, number nine smooth wire, everything. Now I can’t get 20 penny hot-dipped galvanized nails at Home Depot or Lowes. Nothing else even begins to work in the cowpens. They lost any semblance of being real places they had left, the day they quit carrying them. So I had to tell the guys at the front counter first that they did have Masonite and then what it was during my perfunctory ask of which aisle to look down—we all were ashamed standing on either side of it when I got back from my own search, (they didn’t know where I should look) with two 4’X8’ sheets.
Oh Barbara we have a Lament on our hands!
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When I was a kid, all the guys would stand around a car with its hood open giving advice to the owner on his back below the undercarriage. The advice was sometimes helpful, but the real point of it was the bonding of the men in the neighborhood. I haven’t seen that happen in 30 years or more. The mechanics of the car are sealed.
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When I was a kid they wouldn’t let girls take auto shop, but somehow I was able to change out parts from the junkyard on my 52 Chevy. I don’t touch any mechanic on the Suburu.
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Sean, I love the ode because it’s a balance of praise and lament.
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Barbara:
In my response I left too much unsaid about your fabulous poem. Luray said perfectly what it entails: the nouns, the lifting up of things that somehow kept by convention certain identity in the old Hardware stores, now gone from today where we live and act in the loss of those things. Part of it has happened in our vacuum of knowledge, overcome by the tyranny of commercialism, packaging and disappearance of manual processes, all replacing the essential things you’ve named as they manifest item by item, and of course those blessed angels helping us across the river styx of our unfamiliarities with what was so real at one time. We’re living in a world that gets rid of real things. I love the poem which is terribly real and always, your use of the Ode!
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