The Tawdry Masks of Women

By Barbara Hamby Barbara Hamby

Every bus ride is theater, giddy schoolgirls trying on

the tawdry masks of women, flirting with my nephew,

red and green lights, shop windows piled high, gold

glistered skeletal mannequins in slips of iridescent silk.

At night in the wind blowing over the Pont Marie I hear

Camille Claudel crying from the walls of her studio,

and two days before Christmas Elliot and I stand

miraculously alone before La Gioconde, follow her eyes,

cracked surface of her skin like softest sand before the deep

water of her mouth, and later standing in the cold

our Buddhist gardienne Nadine tells me in rapid-fire French

that in all things she tries to remain neutral, neutre, neutre,

neutre, the only word finally I understand in the barrage

tumbling out of her mouth like a waterfall, but I can’t be

neutral, passion welling up in my heart for the exhausted maids,

dapper men in berets, the madwoman on the PC bus,

screaming, Salope, salope, as she descends at the Pont d’Ivry

and everyone on the bus looking at each other, Whore?

Who’s the whore here? or the chic older woman, leather pants

baggy on her skinny shanks, reading a battered paperback

Rimbaud as we take the bus to see Pasolini’s Canterbury Tales,

the master himself as Chaucer, spinning his ribald stories

of human folly, each one a mirror, and when I see myself

in bus windows or store glass, the shock never wears off,

for I recognize myself and see a stranger at the same time,

because the minutes are racing by at the speed of light,

and I am saying goodbye to Paris, to everyone, myself

most of all, watching her disappear down the rue Jeanne d’Arc,

and what can she possibly be thinking as she walks

to the movies in the middle of this afternoon of her life?

Barbara Hamby, “The Tawdry Masks of Women” from Babel. Copyright © 2004 by Barbara Hamby. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.

Source: Babel (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004)

Biography

Born in New Orleans and raised in Hawaii, poet Barbara Hamby earned an MA at Florida State University. She is the author of several poetry collections, including All-Night Lingo Tango (2009); Babel (2004), which won the Association of Writers & Writing Programs’ Donald Hall Prize; and Delirium (1995), which won the Vassar Miller Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book . . .

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