Mother and Child

After Pablo Picasso’s Mother and Child, c. 1901, painted over a portrait of his friend Max Jacob

The artist gave her shame a home.

Paint yourself out of pain, he said, and sketched a child where maybe there was one. The fabric over the woman’s head administers second absolution: virginity, born again. Ten Hail Marys for a penitent girl.

She sits on the ground, cuddling the babe, whose cheek is gold as El Greco’s clergymen, or heaven. He is sin and salvation. But I reject the painting.

I scratch at its surface to speak to the poet, Jacob, entreat him to turn the same material over and over between his bony fingers like a coin or an unredeemed poker chip.