Sunset Memorial: Coos Bay, Oregon

Sunset Memorial; Coos Bay, Oregon


In heaven as below,
an ironic humor turns water to wine,
wine to someone else’s vinegar.
We inherit a corrupting taste
making palatable
what we’re forced to drink.
Therefore, a double latte
if you please.
Whipped cream with the beans.
From the age of bronze to silicon
a new millennium
has come, another gone.

Once, everything important
was writ in rock.
Who, we wonder, had the balls
to chisel riddles
into Cheops’ beast,
centering on a heart of stone.
What ancient chants fused the body
of the king of beasts
with the dissembling face of man?
What magic in them not now in us?
Advancement is a vague and windy thing.
Still, we kill to eat.
Must eat to live.
What passion spurred old Leaky
heart in throat to hike
the narrow gorges searching
for a sign. Seeking the animal in man
through time,
joining four million years with our own?
What of Yeats?
A man whose passion was in monkey glands.
What beast saw he hitchhiking
toward Bethlehem?

Here, stretched upon a hill
of emerald grass that slopes
in passing lines from cross to cross,
sad dues are paid. In this stone,
a thousand worthy names are carved.
Here is Anna. There is Walter.
Danny rests not far away.
All favored citizens
of this humbled city, who hungered,
sought and loved their way
to forgetfulness.
Each caught up in the fever
of their time.
Where is their New Jerusalem?

Here, love is more ache than ecstasy
for each heart knows how fragile
is its house.
How far the distance between our dreams
and the world moved through. Love needs
no walls to hide behind,
no greater monument then our suffering.
Here, past in present merge
the death of dreams and kings into one
troubling image. Both perceiver
and perceived,
we are what we fear most.
We sense that danger
in ourselves but don’t know how
to change.
How kill our hunger for blood,
the mark of the beast
in man but in searching for something
greater than self love alone?
Everything is holy or nothing is.
A purging, transcendent truth warns:
we are responsible
for everything we touch.


Scott Malby

Posted over on Hawkwind Creations