Now that the worms have thrown the last shovelful of oblivion onto your body
now that you live under Los Angeles without needing psychiatrists
now that the haughty bone of your thigh is just dust in a box
and your buttocks are pure dust spread on the satin floor of your tomb
now that the totality of your body fits into the smallest of your powder boxes
now that your toenails lie at your feet scattered like dead planets and
the platinum heels of your gala shoes bend in champagne
baskets under the terrible weight of the
absence of your Achilles' heel
now that the moths in your wardrobe have done the same with your dresses
smelling of Beverly Hills parties of Chanel number 5 of the five fingers of a hand
now that the eccentric millionaire that rented the mansion you
lived in in Brentwood has quit looking for your armpits in
every nook and cranny of the living-room and is organizing
a rhinoceros safari in Peru for his guests
now that the psychiatrist who treated you went bankrupt
and is now writing your ‘memoirs' to pay his taxes and also because his
three wives are really missing the monthly twelve thousand
dollars fee you used to pay him
now that the sleeping pills that you took are running out in drugstores
like definitive lullabies
now that even in the old celluloid films your eyes are closing tired
of so many eyelashes so much vigil so many beams

now that nobody knows who was norma jean baker because
Baker Norma Jeans abound in the telephone directories
now that 188 thousand million psychopaths no longer see you in
English with subtitles in Spanish like a witch of Salem flying on
a baseball bat
now that your ex-husband's drama about your life has not moved
the Broadway critics one way or another
and the photographers's sun has forever ceased to illuminate you
oh she-cat full of mystery on the Mercedes Benz of oblivion
in this tiny Latin American country called Colombia
live several misfit poets who don't want to forget you
(you Marilyn were more important to us than the Monroe doctrine)
and who remember you when the moon rises over the Jaguars
when we slide down the steps of the jet
when we read in the press that Dalí has made a sculpture of your tits with drawers
when a white double-decker ambulance passes swiftly besides us like a siren
and our wives shout from the top of the elevators
Sometimes like now we raise a prayer to you why not raise you in a prayer
in a requiem and an anti-requiem in a prayer to the dead about whom we know only the names
only that every man prays to the one he loves most
especially if the one he loves most is dead
and it is then that we want to lie face down in the Westwood cementery
to feel in our pubic pores the blades of grass that grow in your American groin
now that you're dead and repose without much hope in the resurrection of the body
in that small place which is the belly button of America
after living among spotlights and fog
with shopkeepers and tycoons
with dramatists and policemen
among the mirrors and the mirage
of love

Translation: 2006, Nicolás Suescún