That there had been nothing hitherto
Which had so bound me with sweet chains"
(Dante, Paradiso)
What could possibly be the inducement to write an anniversary post on an actress I was barely old enough to remember when she died and who'd always come to me filtered anyways through media & Hollywood legend? Is a half-decade as great a feat in death as in life? Why always this chronic soft-headed veneration where Marilyn's concerned? A lot's happened since.
"...in her eyes there blazed such a smile"
I think it's rather remarkable that talk of her anniversary--exactly fifty years this Sunday, 5 August-- coincides with my rereading of Dante's Paradiso. If, in other words, I had a choice of any Beatrice, who better than Marilyn to lead the way to my personal Empyrean. Not to the promiscuous , hypocritical and treacherous hell she'd gone to her grave with (plenty of that to go around!) but the heaven of hell she'd made for aging poetical guys like me. I've never really stopped feeling that the "eternal feminine" in dark cat eye glasses is the thing. The wisdom in a woman's eyes is always a good place to begin the journey, too. Ah, Marilyn, what stroppy triune god wouldn't have reflected that back to me as essential light...
"You are not now on earth, as you think you are"
If you think about it, she really wasn't ever of this earth. So where's the journey with her going to lead, anyways? The only heaven Marilyn's ever likely to take the greying heart to is the indelectably mortal one of eyes, hair and chin or just perhaps the bewitching simulacra (between Marilyn and the rest) that end in two tombs: hers and the empty one above reserved for Hefner, her greatest boy-man devotee. And if it's true that vision precedes love, she attracts still with the thrumming excitatory star-pulse of every boy-man. Myself included. It becomes decidedly clearer as I proceed.
"And so my lady said: 'Show forth the heat
Of your desire..."
I've done nothing but show it. Stupid ingratitude is all anyone'll get for this, of course. As the girl with orange-red hair used to pose in cemeteries and had left everything behind in a desert town, so goes the journey of the poet devotee where Marilyn's the fatally delectable object. I recall her saying once, The heart turns against you, down to its goodly pit. So what if my guide had died excommunicate, clutching her pillow, face to the phone. The soft light of her pillow...
"But none the less, all lying set aside"
So I can't turn back, not with that mirror and all the reflected eyes, smile and lips to spur me on, pointing to Hef's empty tomb. No saving Mary on earth could compare to that.
"The rest of the blessed who appeared content
At first to form a lily on the 'M'"
Yes, 'M' for Marilyn, fifty years later. Which is as far as I've gotten with my puny eagle song.
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