! A Robert Hass Prose-Poem Impertinently Versified

Hassless For a summer week he watched her; she watched him watching her. He wrote his music; thought of her, sixtyish, Japanese; flat-breasted like a boy; she brushed her paintings; thought of him, young, eyes like an untamed pony; he grew to love the discipline in her painting; she loved straightway his wild indiscipline. That warm night when, on her tidy, well-swept doorstep, music yet unwritten met rice-paper yet to be inked, she told him of her mastectomy; he looked her in the eye; held hands; and bid goodnight. The blue bowl on his porch the morning after full of rose-petals; underneath, dead bees.