He Couldn’t Speak Of It

and I struggle making a poem

“What does not leave me alone is the ambition for creation, the inner impulse, the eternal tension which in the end obliges me to put into matter my most intimate feelings and visions. “ MELANCHOLY by Albert György

He Couldn’t Speak of It

Uncle Bob was in WWII; he spoke of cold, wind, frozen ground, of resting 
on a snowbank for a cigarette, of noticing a sleeve buried deep. 
I imagine his lurch away from the shroud. Uncle Bob couldn’t cry. 
He stood guard outside the Nuremburg trials
could not speak of what he heard. Uncle Bob drank.
The Jain sect wear masks to not involuntarily kill what is invisible.

I speak obliquely; slashed language of direct experience is not my scorched property
Its teeth are horrible, it is the trembling mouth property 
the silenced mouth property 
the property no one wants; the property of 
those forced to run from home 
unsafely hide headlined 
broken lives in images from broken-hearted photojournalists in the field 
speaking for others 
possibly their last photographic word.

After graduating in Art Education, I taught Earth Science to uninterested middle school kids: sedimentary rock, plate tectonics, metamorphic rock, striated history remnants of excavatable proof of civilizations: shards, ochred walls, bones in a huddled mass of circled arms. 

My lifetime
layers. I’m surprised
my bathwater runs clear of blood as the stock market rises
from our explosive economy.

Do ghosts of children play in their before yard.

The fastest supercomputer has a processing speed of 442 quadrillion 
floating-point operations per second 
light remains the fastest moving property in the universe.

I’ve met people who sparkle fiercely 
as living eulogy for their dead
their dead a star suspended
punched-through dark sky
polluted war-skies.

There is a new constellation 
a circle visibly pulsing low over the earth.

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