17 Dollars

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 some else could.

  Even now I go to the shelves to look for The Trial

or The Day of the Locusts 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 the 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.

-Barbara Hamby

This is from Barbara Hamby's new and selected collection, On The Street of Divine Love, which came out in 2014. (It's no longer the newest and there are two volumes since then.) This is from what was then the new section, and the poem first appeared in the literary magazine Agni. She's the writer-in-residence at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

I like her poems a lot and have read a couple of other volumes. They're mostly in this style, and she calls them odes as a rule, though not this one. An alternation of long and short lines, they might also be thought of as elegiacs. (Though that suggests elegy, instead of Propertius, and that's certainly not right.) They're funny, but also with some heft, at their best. (Hazel Motes a dingbat?  Maybe!) 

I put the book on my Books of Summer list, but am making my way through it slowly, and so can't yet count it. But I expect I will soon! (And might have more to say then.)