Simile

As when Picasso, in the story that is often told,
painstakingly painted Gertrude Stein's portrait
from a palette of mostly browns,
painted in eighty or ninety sittings everything but the head--
the shoulders sloping, left hand placed
on the left leg, fingers spread, right arm
resting on the right leg, fingers slightly bent,
the body shapeless beneath black-drowned creases,
ripples of abysmal browns, the yellowing neckerchief
fixed to a point by a square of red paint-
and then, in a fit of frustration faced her and said,
"I cannot see you any longer when I look."
She had to leave Paris so that he could go back
and give her a strange, mask-like face for a head,
and when friends complained
the painting looked nothing like her, or rather, she
looked nothing like it, Picasso simply replied, "She will," so

my mother, facing me before I left that evening,
looked at the face no other painter for all her painful determination
and skill could reproduce and, from the look on her face
I understood, she knew, for better or worse what I would become.