Nothing at all about the day reminded me of Gertrude Stein's "If I Told Him, a Completed Portrait of Picasso" which appears in her book Selections, available at local bookstores. I was just washing my one lunch plate after writing a shitpost about the race for Lieutenant Governor ~in the middle of a pandemic~ when the rhythms of the poem entered my brain like birdsong through a window.

Stein's poetry is challenging if you treat it like a Frost poem, but it's less challenging if you treat it like what it is—a composition, a piece of music, an abstract painting made of words. Stein uses words as words—that is, she's relying on their received meanings—but she also uses them only for their sound, or for their color.

A few things:

• "If I told him..." is her second poetic portrait of Picasso. Stein, who was an influential art collector partly responsible for Picasso's fame, wrote this one after the painter painted her portrait, which she famously loved and which everyone else famously thought looked nothing like her. "For me, it is I, and it is the only reproduction of me, which is always I," she wrote of it.

• And yet, in this poem Stein wrestles with her feeling that Picasso, like Napoleon, is a diminutive tyrant and womanizer—which he was—and so a portrait of him would require her to reflect that. In the conditional, funny tone of the opening lines you can hear her feel herself wielding her power—would he like this word portrait of himself if I basically just compare him to Napoleon a lot? "I judge judge," she writes, as a digging reminder that she's partly the reason for his success.

• If you think for one moment that Stein didn't have a lot of fun writing this, say these lines aloud to yourself: "He he he he and he and he and and he and he and he and and." She's laughing, and she's also providing a linguistic representation of world leaders up until 1923, when the poem was first published in Vanity Fair. (You could represent a list of U.S. presidents using the same language.) In this way, the portrait of Picasso is a portrait of Napoleon is a portrait of the patriarchy. As she says brilliantly at the close of the poem: "Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches." In this line, history is literally repeating itself dumbly, as the Great Man story has repeated itself dumbly, which is what she's learned from studying history, and which is what she worked to overcome and challenge in her own life—even among her friends.