blackberry, blackberry, blackberry...

donny just reminded me of robert hass. so i went over to my bookshelf and grabbed my four hass books and thumbed through them, reading my silly undergrad margin notes, smiling at the marked pages. i miss reading things that are beautiful. and i truly think that hass's writings are wonderful. simple, sensual, natural, heartbreaking.

when mark was here a few months ago, he directed me to this one poem called "a story about the body". it breaks my heart. it's from a collection called _human wishes_, which came out in 1989, and is a lot more prose-y than a lot of hass's other stuff. it's amazing nonetheless. here it is:

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 of her studio -- was full of dead bees.

ah, all the new thinking is about loss, indeed. in this it resembles all the old thinking...