Barbara Hamby
Ode on My Waist
Negative numbers were a mystery
till the summer
I turned fifteen and acquired a
waist,
one day a human hotdog the next
Brigitte Bardot,
well, not her but in the same
category,
And God Created Woman, not
from Adam’s rib
but from a little girl, one day
playing Barbies,
the next day initiated into the
swirling world
of algebraic reverses, rib cage
on the hypotenuse
of the hip, gauge the indent, a
new paragraph
in the book of lust, boys
sniffing like a pack
of hounds, the mathematics of
breeding wrapped
in the high-gloss patina of
mini skirts and push-up
bras, magazines telling me how
to walk, sit, smile,
cross my legs, cross my heart,
act stupid,
act smart, not knowing the dark
chasm I was stepping
into, the fissure of Scarlett’s
18 inches,
the history of waists,
Peloponnesian isthmus—corseted
Athenian bosom at war with
girdled Spartan hips—
how to end up without a swollen
waist, captive slave
in the marketplace of K-12? O
Solomon,
how could you forget the waist
in your immortal song?
Thy navel is like a round
goblet, thy belly
like a heap of wheat set about
with lilies, thy waist a bay
on the body’s shore, the legs’
tropical blossom,
equator of a world so
mysterious we could almost
circumnavigate it with our
hands, then—poof—it flies
away like a flock of blackbirds
in the white curve of the sky.
Ode on My Terrariums
An enormous pickle jar is where
they all began,
and a large, rough
pickle-loving family on hand
to yield an ever constant
supply. Les tres riches heures
de ma vie, wasting the
minutes of my ninth summer
scouring the briny smell from
the honeycomb of glass,
using my mother’s
wedding-silver knife to scrape moss
from the shadows of pines,
laying it on three levels
of progressively coarser soil.
First the rough gravel
scooped from the driveway where
our 1957
green Rambler station wagon
rested every night, one
of the worst mistakes my dad
made in a long, surreal
history of bad deals, dropped
stitches, missed chances, all
my mom’s money down the
oubliette of big and tall
swank men’s shops for the
suits, topcoats, wingtips, crisp white shirts
that would make him look like
the million bucks he’d flirt
with all his days but never
even get a first name,
much less a telephone number.
Level two, sand from
Buckroe Beach with the sad
abandoned merry-go-rounds
and ferris wheels of winter,
the grains filtering down
into the gravel and on top rich
loam from the pond
by the road Mr. Benthall passed
each day in his long
low Cadillac. Then the plants,
a splash of water, screw
on the lid and watch your
little world respire, the dew
beading the dome of pickle
heaven, to rain, then drain
through soil and sand and
gravel, to vaporize again
and again. My perfect world on
Benthall Road, no Cain
to upset my Edens lined up on
the window sill,
a little god, creating her
globes out of sheer will
for order, like Velasquez
painting Las Meninas,
the dwarves, ladies-in-waiting,
a shimmering princess,
Philip IV, doting father, in
the background, king
but unable to pay his pastry
chef, the painting
Velasquez’s bid for a minor
nobility,
but artist and king soon dead,
the girl at twenty-three,
worn out by seven royal births.
My terrariums
rarely lasted more than a week
or so—too much sun,
not enough. A nine-year-old
god’s rattletrap world takes
the pesky second law of
thermodynamics
and runs with it into a quantum
universe thick
with biospheres, communes,
ashrams, and parallel worlds
splitting off with each second,
a universe unfurled
like the arms of Kali, the
Hindu goddess of death
or transformation, every moment
a little death
or pirouette into another
Balanchine dream
or nightmare, depending on your
point of view. It seems
a perfect world must hide in
all this teeming being,
that midsummer’s afternoon,
phlox and jasmine blooming,
where fathers didn’t miss their
chance looking for fool’s gold,
or can it be this gaudy world
with its missed trains, real
estate deals gone bad, children
clamoring for more than
one woman can give them,
splintered by a glittering sun,
more glorious than any king and
his starry crown.
Flesh, Bone,
and Red
Looking at Rubens’s panels for
Marie de Medicis
in the Louvre with Stuart, whom
my husband
calls Maria Stuarda for no
other reason
than the Italian rolls off his
tongue
so sweetly and I think of how
he wooed me
with a barrage of words so
cunningly fluent,
so linguistically adroit, I was
caught like a dragonfly
in a spider’s web, a delicious
death,
but here we are older and not
particularly wiser
in Paris, and Stuart is walking
with one boot off
because of arthritis in her
foot, and my big toe
aches intermittently from a
dance injury,
and I carry the x-ray with me,
if for nothing else
to contemplate the beauty of my
bones,
all twenty six, delicately
rigged,
somehow more elegant than the
foot itself,
and Stuart is explaining
Rubens’s genius,
how his choice to separate the
two cheeks
of a demi-goddess’s buttocks
with brick red instead of black
is glorious, and this room in
the former palace
looks like nothing so much as
an opera set,
home of the Scottish princess,
red-haired beauty
of Brodsky’s poems, but now
ensconced in Verdi’s opera,
beheaded by her rival for the
English throne,
and sometimes my toe hurts so
much I want to cut it off,
the little I know about blood
saving me,
and wine seems to dull the pain
so we limp
through the bitter night to a
little restaurant
in the Marais, order a feast,
and toast ourselves
again and again with glasses of
rough Corsican red,
though Stuart and I can’t stop
talking about the flesh
of Rubens’s women, its rosiness,
its amplitude,
our own bodies growing thicker,
more regal with age,
the glory of youth passing like
a runaway train
as we sit in a field of
poppies, meal spread
on blankets, bottles of
champagne, paté,
long bayonets of bread, grapes
like mermaids tears,
with each morsel making our
bodies as Rubens
painted his queens, blue by
flesh by stroke by red.
Barbara Hamby has two books of poetry: Delirium (University of North
Texas, 1995) and The Alphabet of Desire (New York University Press). Her
third book, Babel, won the 2003 AWP/Donald Hall Prize and will be
published next year by the University of Pittsburgh Press. She has work
forthcoming in the Paris Review, Western Humanities Review,
Boulevard, Indiana Review, and the Yale Review. |