A Story About the Body


I don't know what led me to this story - a prose-poem
by Robert Hass -- this very day. It is one year since Lolly Simkins Daniels,
chose the Way of the Eagle and plunged into the Lake of the Heart.
Love you, Lolly...

This poem was found in The Rag and Bone shop of the Heart~~~
I think it is a true story.

A Story About the Body

The young composer, working that summer at an artist's colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she made amused or considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, "I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you I have had a double mastectomy," and when he didn't understand, "I've lost both my breasts." the radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity--like music--withered, very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, "I'm sorry. I don't think I could." He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl--she must have swept them from the corners of her studio--was full of dead bees.

--by Robert Haas

From Brian's Blog this is a discussion
of the poem I found interesting as well, just the thinking about it.