Lost

image borrowed from bing

Lost

It was unseasonably hot in Brentwood
that August morning in 1962, as she
reclined nude, lying on her back in the
middle of her scattered silk sheets
with rivulets of sour sweat running down
between her large breasts, as she struggled
to recall what Bobby had come to talk to her
about just after midnight, as the old friends
chloral hydrate and nembutal rocked her
ever so gently into a cloud of forgetfulness,
and she lapsed back to moments in her
past, with her trio of husbands and legions
of lovers standing in a weeping daisy chain
around her, poised in a canopy bed
in the middle of a meadow, her nakedness
so natural at noon in a sunny nether land,
then 17 again in 1944, working at the airplane factory,
smoking weed with a young Bob Mitchum
on lunch breaks, with Jim off in the Merchant Marines,
and that first picture of her published in Yank magazine,
and her subsequent nude photo sessions that
would serve her well for the rest of her days;
that shorter marriage to Joe who couldn’t
understand why she would not just give up her
career and cook pasta for him and his buddies,
followed by those five years with Arthur, the two
miscarriages, capped by that damned picture in
Nevada, baking liking road kill on those salt flats
watching Monty struggle, Gable being the
perfect gentleman, Huston smoking cigars
among his oxygen bottles, perplexed now why
she refused to sleep with Deano even though he
adored her, or if Fox would let her return to the set
leashed to her demon hordes of fright, or was it
too late, just too damned late as she drifted
into a black fog she would remain lost within
forever.

She hung around for a couple days after
they discovered her body, attended her own
funeral, happy that Lee delivered the eulogy,
pleased at how Joe handled the affair, that
they buried her in one of her favorite Emilio
Pucci dresses, lying in state within her shining
bronze casket lined with champagne colored
silk, clutching a sweet bouquet of pink teacup
roses that Joe would refresh in that pot
hanging outside her crypt for decades,
and it tickled her to find out that Hefner
had paid plenty to buy the crypt to the
left of hers, giving her credit for the
energetic successful launch of Playboy.


Glenn Buttkus

January 2012


Listed as #18 over on Magpie Tales 98

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