Questions and Topics We Can Help to Answer
Paper Instructions;

write a literary analysis of this poem 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 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.