Robert Hass (1941 - )

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

(1989)

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Tunnels of the Broadway Bridge
Brian Wood

A dream dreamed again until I made this picture then never
dreamt again. From the boyhood then: walking into sweated sheets; walking in
a sweat of blood. On a bridge: cement piers plowing up a smooth muscled
river. Silted, blistering currents pulling silently through our town, the hissing
aftertaste every mother's nightmare. Death-river whispering to young bodies.

Across the bridge. Halfway across. Looking over. A cat is the end of my
arm: scratching, tearing, dragging me over. Fighting to shake its searing eyes
pulling mind rippling under I'm buried in flesh.

It is my arm.

Writhing, harrowed bone. Dismember me tear twist me inside out, pull
water up into the sky: claws rip at sucking marrow hold on to the sky rush-
ing away and hammer that wedge of stone down into your heart's throat to
gut and kill and love till it stops. Then it's gone; a woman gyres slowly to
the river as if rising.

Quantam leap to the end of the bridge sloping up toward a dark sky: an
empty bridge moonlit and silent, my right foot fixed at the center of a white-
chalked circle, just the radius of my left leg's reach.

I cannot move.

A man comes from the other side, each step covers half the distance left, slow
yet quick as light, no time passed; suddenly close on my face, my father. His
hand raised, he plunges a knife in my thigh, lunging into my reaching flesh,
a boar's tusk buried to the lips.

Instantly out from this hot pouch, this thigh, I'm born and up in a twisting
flight of feathers.