This brief prose poem by Robert Hass describes a painful interaction between a young man and an older woman, and the message that she leaves for him the following morning. The narrator is a young composer who is spending the summer at an artists’ colony. He becomes infatuated with an older Japanese artist who is also summering there. When describing her, he first talks about how much he loves her work.

He then talks about her physical grace and direct manner, almost as though these attributes are a reflection of her work rather than of her nature. The author refers to the composer as being ‘young’, but does not reveal his actual age, leaving the reader to use his or her own definition of what that means. The artist is described as being “almost sixty”, leading the reader to speculate as to why a young man would be attracted to a woman of this age. Is it simply that he is attracted to her work and manner, or is there some hint of an Oedipal attraction toward a mother figure?

Returning from a concert one evening, the artist tells the composer that she senses that he wants to have sex with her, but that she has to tell him that she has had a double mastectomy. Apparently the composer doesn’t grasp the meaning of the medical terminology, so she has to explicitly explain that both of her breasts have been removed. The composer describes the effect of this information on him as though “the radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity–like music– withered, very quickly…”. The anticipation of intimacy that the composer had built up inside himself disappeared when he discovered that the artist was damaged. He describes this eagerness in terms of his art form, music. The composer has to force himself to meet the artist’s eyes as he tells her that he doesn’t believe that he can be physically intimate with her, given her deformity. The next morning he finds a blue bowl on the front porch of his cabin that he, at first, believes is full of rose petals. He discovers, upon closer examination, that it is actually full of dead bees with a layer of rose petals on top.

There are several different possible interpretations of what the bowl dead bees covered with rose petals represents. The artist could have been making a statement about the deceptiveness of appearances. The composer initially saw only the rose petals, and thought that the bowl was full of them. He quickly realized though that the petals only constituted a thin veneer of beauty covering death and decay. When he thought he was in love with the artist, he was only aware of the veneer of beauty; when she exposed the reality of past pain and pathology beneath the veneer, his feelings of love disappeared. Was the artist trying to tell the composer that beneath the veneer of beauty and grace lies the inevitable process of decay ending in death?

The blue bowl could represent the world, with a veneer of beauty covering the raw reality of the natural cycle of life and death. It could also symbolize the artist’s body, holding the actuality of her damaged form beneath the façade of grace and beauty that composer saw when he looked at her. The color of the bowl suggests an eternal or ethereal quality, suggesting that the message being conveyed is transcendent of time and place.

The most disturbing element of the gift that the artist leaves for the composer is the multitude of dead bees. What kind of message was she trying to convey to the composer with a bowl full of dead insects? The bee is symbolic of fertility in many cultures, going back as far as the ancient Egyptians. The dead bees could represent the artist’s conception of her lost fertility, covered by the layer of external beauty that she still maintains. This interpretation is weakened however, by the fact that the composer knew she was close to the age of sixty and would not have expected her to be fertile even before being informed about the double mastectomy.

The bees could directly represent the artist’s breasts. Bees create a nutritious fluid, like the female breast. The abdomen of a bee has a bulbous shape with a conical tip, similar to that of a breast. Perhaps the artist was sending the composer a rather literal message about the nature of her deformity. Another possibility is that she was ritually purging herself of the ghost of her missing breasts. The composer speculates that the artist swept the dead bees from the corners of her studio. Perhaps the artist was cleansing her creative space, which may be perceived as her body, of the contamination of disease.

Whatever meaning the dead bees and rose petals may have, the motivation for the artist leaving them for the composer is unclear. She could have been angry at the artist for his rejection of her. This would give the gift an ominous tone, one of bitterness and resentment. I prefer to interpret her motivation as a sign of understanding and forgiveness from an older artist to a younger one. The artist is telling the composer that she understands that he is younger and has a younger person’s attachment to surface aesthetics, while reminding him that beneath surface is the unavoidable reality of mortality and decay.