Disturbing Muses

I have said, I think, that these poems are interpretations of what the poet sees on the canvas. I add that they are imaginary biographies, as true as anything that actually happened: they are biographies written the other way around, from the evidence of the art. Pablo Picasso's relationship with women, for instance, as when he left her a twisted, flattened shell, curled like wet canvas on his padded chair, mouth soundlessly screaming from the same side of her face that both eyes now stared...