February 22: Prose Poem, "A Story About the Body," Robert Hass

One of my favorite poetic forms in the prose poem, which is sort of a hybrid of the short story and poetry.  I took a whole class one summer in the subject.  I'm not sure I've ever written a really successful prose poem, but Robert Hass has.

Saint Marty loves this poem:

A Story About the Body

by: Robert Hass

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 and 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 that 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 where on top; the rest of the bowl--she must have swept them from the corners of her studio--was full of dead bees.

Don't mess with this lady...