Marilyn Monroe - poems and images

Marilyn Monroe

by AndrĂŠ de Dienes from Marilyn Mon Amour

For Marilyn Monroe born 1st June died 5th August

After the Zenith How sweet your wide-eyed smile, your blonde cascade, your bright flesh bathed in the sea!

How much beauty stuffed in your little finger, how elegant your warm scent wrapped in a white, silk sheet!

There's no one like you.

None as soft, none as simple as your sweet laughter.

Your dark twin took you at night among monsters to her world.

(Everything yields to its opposite.)

They made you suffer for your comedy, the astronomical stakes of your perfected play.

The city singed your deracinated nerves at 5am unsoothed.

After the zenith you fell in the cooling summer into the desolate earth leaving your smile in the tender celluloid of the sky glittering in the hour before dawn.

2

Variations poems inspired by the writings of Marilyn Monroe collected in Fragments (Buchthal & Comment)

1 I hang between twilight and searchlight.

My head heads toward earth, my feet twinkle in the stars.

I cling as gossamer clings to the winter tree, too fine for the naked eye.

The wind blows, I go on clinging.

My rays reach in every direction, each is a mirror of its twin that the frost spangles, prisms of ice break the daylight into a million colours. They shake my fine lines, they offer clues along the way between tomorrow and yesterday.

3

2 A fine line tests the air between me and you.

It touches the places you leave bare of the fabric of your suit.

Can you see the shape that changes when you look away?

We change direction and we part.

Do you remember words mouthed?

I say them over to myself to gather their meaning.

Didn't I see you guess my secret fear?

I was listening to the breezes trouble the summer leaves.

4

3 Stones in the path show their colours to the sun.

My feet are afraid of the hard nub.

The air between us, friend, the space, it widens.

The atmosphere thins.

The stones are shaped like eyes.

I watch them watch a face I've never seen.

5

Marilyn Monroe dreams of Lee Stasburg What can it mean to be filled with sawdust?

Like an antiquated shop-dummy from Jean Rhys's Paris – satin skin, silk hair and a sawdust heart.

Does it come of anxiety, like being naked in public (having forgotten one's lines) to be naked on the inside, brainless like the straw-man, heartless, soulless, wooden as Pinocchio though clothed in fabulous skin?

Sawdust falls from the circular saw slicing a forest to dice.

Sawdust heaped on the butcher's floor soaks up a mess of blood.

The optimistic surgeon wields his knife.

'Be healed!' he cries, seeking a human organ.

Spectators enter the theatre.

He murmurs, ‘Hush!’

O don't disappoint him.

Yield him the very nerve-knot that triggers your beating heart.

6

In the emptying sky your diamond fire dissolves like a sugar crystal into luminous morning.

Š Marian Webb 2012