Another Story about the Body

after Robert Hass​

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I’d remembered the artist opening her kimono and the young composer—unable to bear the sight—turning and walking through the pines towards his cabin. But in Hass's poem there is no kimono. Two already here, but there: the artist and the note that she was Japanese, nearly sixty, a fastidious housekeeper, a gifter of a bowl of petals and bees. What shall I name this ache I carry inside my own chest cavity? A withering music? This soft, old button-down was my mother’s. But it wasn’t the scars that sent the composer into the woods, just the knowledge of what had been lost, and not a hard knowledge, no thumb to the sternum, just hearsay, the sounds of the concert still reverberating through the trees. Did he love her work still? Was her work still the way she moved her body? Often in late winter, I find hundreds of dead ladybugs in the front room, and when the paper towels fail me, I drag out the vacuum and suck up the carcasses. The scar on my abdomen is most obvious but also the weird flat nipples, the indent of tissue where the doctor sewed them back on. How unlike bodies most bodies are. And yes, it was a blue bowl, the buzzing certainly silenced, but who knows how long ago?