Fragments_ Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters - Marilyn Monroe [9]
my love sleeps besides me—
in the faint light—I see his manly jaw
give away—and the mouth of his
boyhood returns
with a softness softer
its sensitiveness that trembling
in stillness
his eyes must have look out
wonderously from the cave of the little
boy—when the things he did not understand—
he forgot but will he look like this when he is dead
oh unbearable fact inevitable
yet sooner would I rather his love die
than/or him?
the pain of his longing when he looks
at another—
like an unfulfillment since the day
he was born.
And I in merciless pain
and with his pain of longing—
when he looks at and loves another
like an unfulfillment of since the day
he was born—
we must endure
I more sadly because I can feel no joy
oh silence why don’t/aren’t you still soothe me
you sounds drums stillness hurt my ears head—and
pierce ears
jars my head with the stillness of
sounds unbearable/durable—
on the screen of pitch blackness
comes/reappears the shapes of monsters who are
my most steadfast companions—
my blood is throbbing with unrest
turns it route in the opposite another direction
and the whole world is sleeping
ah peace I need you—even a
peaceful monster.
Note: Wissett is a village in Suffolk. It is not known what the number refers to; possibly it is a phone number.
I guess I have always been
deeply terrified at to really be someone’s
wife
since I know from life
one cannot love another,
ever, really.
it is not to be for granted
in life less that the old woman hides—
from her mirror glass—the one she polishes so it won’t be dusty—
daring sometimes that to
to see her toothless gasp and if she perhaps very gently smiles
years only she remembers—
her life or imagined youth pain
her pale chiffon dress
that she wore on a windy
afternoon when she walked
where no one had ever been
her blue eyed clear eyed baby who
lived to die—the woman’s youth years have
not left. The woman stares & stares in space
where his eyes rest with pleasure—
I want to still be—but time has changed
the hold of that glance.
Alas how will I cope when I am
even less youthful—
I seek joy but you are it is clothed
with pain—
have courage - to be brave take heart as in my youth
sleep and rest my heavy head
on your his breast—because for still my love
sleeps beside me.
Marilyn reading Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, 1951
Marilyn reading Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, 1952
ROXBURY NOTES
1958
In the summer of 1957, Marilyn and Arthur Miller bought a house in Roxbury, Connecticut, where Arthur had already lived with his first wife. They initially considered having the house demolished in order to have a new one built by Frank Lloyd Wright, with a swimming pool, a home cinema, a theater, and a big office for Arthur, but the project turned out to be too expensive and they contented themselves with renovating the property.
Marilyn probably wrote these few pages in the spring of 1958, and their tone is particularly disenchanted. The couple stayed a long time in the country, but, loveless now, their home seemed empty. Arthur worked with little success on the screen adaptation of his own short story The Misfits, and Marilyn quickly got bored with her role of housewife. Even the arrival of spring and leaves on the trees were no longer any solace, since they reminded her of failed attempts at motherhood, the lack of a child she had hoped for. At this time she would look closely at her own face in a magnifying