How with several intermissions
I misspent my early twenties chasing

after a man more than twice my age,

sad and famous. It felt
inevitable, to be known

by association, in a long tradition
of geniuses’ wives. Françoise Gilot
on Picasso: a catastrophe

I didn’t want to avoid. Yes,
it was like that—a stepping out

into the traffic of great thinkers and doers,
late dinners with people who for years

I had read, read about.
It was a waking into the dream I’d tended
since the provincial valley of childhood.

Once,
near the beginning of this story,
he came back

from visiting Julian Assange
on house arrest in England,
a country manor with a farm.

Some piglets
had just been born

and they reminded him of me

he told me in bed his first night home:
pink and cute, inspiring

the desire to touch them,
to excite them.

It was the end of the summer
Julian was the most wanted man in the world

and I had the distinct feeling of finally
having done something right,

to have been selected

as though on the basis of some
essential, exceptional quality.
How good I looked naked.

I can admit now
it was a mistake, to fall

for the myth of satisfaction
in other people, in another,

and graver still, to try
to hold a man who values the untamed
above all else, above love.

But would I take it back—
when longing for him was longing

for an idea, an image of myself? No.
The truth: I wanted to be a muse then

more than I wanted to be an artist,
but the spell just didn’t take. To break new

I had to be broken.