Picasso, Minotaur Caressing the Hand of a Sleeping Girl with his Snout, 1933

Its vegetarian mouth is open. In films little diamonds tilt from velvet pouches. Fingers manicured for close-ups raise the little diamonds and light shows the diamonds’ white grids. Light makes each facet oblique. Diamonds seem to sparkle because they are serially made blank by light, and their relief into transparency as they wheel out of light seems like glitter.

The minotaur weighs over the woman. The hairs of the hide along the bridge of its nose meet at the center. The bull’s head is larger than a man’s but the bull’s head is full of round and flat teeth made for pulling the white-rooted, wet-rooted stalks from the field and mashing them in the mouth like a warm grinding mill.

The minotaur has hands like a man. The head of a man, the head of a bull, the hands of a man, the minotaur’s hands … the ridiculous size of masculine bodies, their hardness packed in flesh and hair, like a truck engine wrapped in a sweater …

The minotaur’s curled head is made of edgy shapes, trapezoids and rough hair which at the limits of the head can be seen-through as the minotaur moves: between the black point or black curve and the slope of the animal head is the wallpaper, the moonlight on the wallpaper, the minotaur’s shoulder.