A Story about "A Story About the Body"

 In our month of poetry reading, I chose "A Story about the Body" by Robert Hass

Here is 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 mused 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 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 the corners of her studio--was full of dead bees.

I chose it because I had fond memories of this poem.  I've spoken several times to students and friends and teachers about it, focusing on the image of the bowl and petals and bees.  I came across the poem as a student teacher in a collection of "Poems from the 90s" or something... which would have been contemporary at the time.  I recall feeling like it was profound and thick with meaning.  

Whatever I felt at the time eludes me now.  Was it "wow, what a great response from the woman!  she burned him!"?  Was it, "what a truthful picture of being a man -- being honest about his attraction"? 

Yikes.  I hope not.  

What remains in this poem for me is a picture of super selfish dude that really wasn't attracted to anything essential about her.  If he really was atracted to the way she moved her body and used her hands and her direct communication... then he would probably be attracted to her independently of any part of her that is not purely "normative."  How many of us have bodies that are without blemish, anyway?  

And what remains is the inscrutability of the delivery of the bowl.  Why would she waste her time with such a cad?  What really does the bowl of bees mean?  And where the hell did she find the corpses of a BOWLFUL of bees?  Did she have a geriatric bee colony in her studio?

I am a little embarrassed about my own naive reaction to the poem, which to me seems to hit all the wrong chords.  This embarrassment about an earlier self is just what I was taking from "Zero Cost House."