Selected poems
Samuel
He's not difficult to find. Black men stand out in rich
barrios. He'll be standing outside the supermarket,
smiling, a self-appointed doorman selling a magazine
nobody buys. I've known him for a few weeks in each
of several years. His name is Samuel. He's from Ghana.
His father is dead. He sends what money he can to
his mother. He has no papers and no work because
he has no papers. Madrilenos offer small change after
shopping. Passersby sometimes approach with a euro
or two. Many dally to talk. He knows them, his clients,
various small and large details of their lives, what
to ask, friendly, without ever being thought a friend.
Before I fly home I hand him my leftover Euros and
he always asks god to bless me. I don't belabour him
with agnostic doubts for fear I'll debase his frangible
currency of gratitude, He gives me all he has to give.
I give him a few crumbs swept from a table of plenty.
Mm
So alive in death is how Juan Ramon Jimenez described the poet Antonio
Machado. We might say as much of Marilyn though it's not her words that
inform the imaginings of admirers fifty years post mortem. A giant plaster
statue in Rosalind Park models her scene in The Seven Year Itch, pleated
white dress billowing in updraft from subway exhibiting legs and underwear
while she blazes that ain't-this-wonderful grin. An image DiMaggio hated
so violently, demeaning for any woman of his, far too much whore and no
madonna whatsoever. Today they're shooting selfies between her legs. She's
also strung from light poles in View Street wearing a gold lame halter neck
gown plunging to her navel, her head tilted back just a little, her hands behind
her back, eyelids ultra lashed, heavily mascared, lowered so you can barely
see her eyes. Her lips scarcely part in an I-could-be-so-good-for-you smile.
Somebody said when she entered a room with Miller every woman hated her –
and every man hated him. With gratuitous nastiness to both the press labelled
them the egghead and the hourglass. Hers is a made up kind of life. Neither
blonde nor Marilyn nor Monroe. Mother in and out of mental hospitals. Foster
care for Norma Jeane. Abused. Believed Clark Gable to be her father for most
of her life. Relationships tricky. Three divorces. Got mixed up with Sinatra, the
Kennedys and assorted trouble. Difficult on the set. Late, moody and unlearned
of lines. According to Wilder an endless puzzle without any solution. Years
later, Clive James sneered She was as good at playing abstract confusion in the
same way that a midget is good at being short. Method, psychiatry and drugs
accompanied her back and forth through the porous borders of reason. Dead
at 36, alone, naked, drowned in barbiturates and swiftly passed into the hands
of strangers. Monroe knew betrayal as giver and receiver. Strasberg never
distributed the contents of the box of her belongings to people she liked, maybe
unable to find an affective memory for friendship's obligations. His third wife
flogged the contents for millions at Christies in '99. But this show is not about
troubling details. Think a 'celebration' of a creation called Marilyn Monroe,
an invention of the studio and Norma Jeane - who spoke of MM in the third
person. You can inspect some of her belongings in the gallery, see her fingers'
impressions in old makeup, take an excursion to genteel necrophilia, visit
a reliquary of the woman the cruel cameras loved. A woman utterly fabulous
on the screen, said Wilder. A woman alive in death as surely as Don Antonio,
someone we're still making into whatever we want her to be, someone still
turning millions for people she never knew.
One time friend
Once upon a time we were related, emerging biographies
enmeshed, edited by in-laws, each complementing the other,
one brimming urbanity's assurance, one bashful and book
bound. Nothing much to fight over, neither wed to dogma
nor seared by acids of covetousness. After divorce sundered
those biographies we stayed friends – until he contracted
expedient amnesia, steeled his heart safe, scatheless, swore
fealty to inviolable pride while I blundered, lacking pole star
or compass, in outer darkness - and emerged changed. I never
claim for the better. And yet I grieved when told he'd died.
Many were our good times. Pity the last 20 years or so.
He seemed a diffident revisionist, stroller of clean-swept
pavements, companion for flood-lit avenues, not a man for
the back streets where lesser cowards sometimes quaking go.
B. N. Oakman's poetry has been widely published in Australia and internationally. Recent collections include In Defence of Hawaiian Shirts and Second Thoughts. In 2016 the actor John Flaus recorded 25 of his poems for a CD titled What Did I Know?