Toward the New Syntax
1
We have known dreams
written in God’s syntax
and then called
for interpreters and counselors,
translators and therapists, sought
new Bibles written in the languages
of golfers, housewives, and for small group
settings. The closest we come
reading is in our grief.
2
First,
take up again
the leaf of a fruit tree.
Seek out all it shares
with the child who will
allow the world again
to vanish
for what today may come
imagining.
3
If a song of praise is our entrance here
or will even assist our understanding,
then let us sing, let us recite from hearts,
to the one surveying the range of time
and times, all as mysterious in one,
a newly blossoming Sumerian domain,
while also countenancing abandoned Skylab,
Stonehenge, and the slave trade of what we call
the 17th century, while also sending glaciers
that form those slabs later to be used, oil
to be made and used in one, Job there
in story to swallow the words given him
and bow in the dust, and Cultural
revolution streamlines China, and
the prayers of first graders speak out
on the divide with Lebanon on the eve
of the Six Days War, and the shaping
corridors of a universe we have
yet to build telescopes to see, and holding
my moments and hearing my prayer.
We sing before
the One I cannot approach
in these clothes of my quest, the One
I can only render with commas
or a child’s drawing or a Mozart at piano,
of experiences no priest or writer knows
or has ever returned from.
Then, to approach,
how to be three again,
and also twenty, forty,
how to be eighty
all these at once,
and to ask for favor, which voice
will I use, who will I stand as,
not juxtaposed as in memories
or wisps as in blurred camera vision:
who, within, is eternal, now,
present?
4
The objection, before praise
and first questions, will be
voiced: isn’t this just
imagining
eternity as envisioned
in a dropped camera?
A double exposure? Is this anything
but more hearsay? I have wondered,
creeping backwards
in these later days
after my son took his life
when no one talks about
heaven as in those first days
after his loss, and my own thoughts
only stray there today—
to thoughts of heaven—
when I try to frame him in a life
that goes on, surprised
and happy:
Heaven?
Could I enter your time?
Could I endure the foreign lingual
chain of your high praise
that structures our dreams
and visions? Could I become fluent
creeping into your moment,
which must be all moments?
5
The world is alive
yet everything that enters
me is hopelessly
past-tense. How then,
could immersion offer
this, my lifespan,
begun in the age
of Chuck Berry, Elvis,
and the arrangement of
seats on a bus,
the least height or weight
or the least reason
to my suffering?
At first breach
I would be undone.
Growth
seems another unlikely path,
also study, science, religion. Nothing
with training unless advanced
with childhood will lead to that place—
it must be a place—
all moments, all
at once, no lab
of Heaven,
no alchemist’s
work but to drop
all hope of syntax, ritual,
desire, collapsed
and then to sail as they once
desired the Arctic
famed in their white imaginings,
immersion,
all at once, to
creep, like faith,
to the core
in fevered days
we have imagined.
6
Certain bees,
or flies with a hundred eyes
mock me from the picnic table.
The other creatures you have put me over
have abilities I cannot reach, we
in our speech cannot know, unless in gifts.
To admire flies, to praise the ant,
a life beyond the whale
or dolphin, a form we cannot
know today
brings us to watch, to marvel
this splashing into the newness
like a million slaps of water that fail
gleaming and wet
against the deck.
The fly is off and away.
7
To promise as I promise
to return and to tell,
to speak as in a dream,
and to stay true to the vision,
but also like Prometheus, to bring
back the fire, to translate
from garbled tongue spitting,
the legacy.
8
One thing remains
and does not fail,
even today, after my failures
to see the green shape, the leaf,
to even start
and to know answered
what I thought
to ask of you
to know:
there remains a place
to walk
in the cool of the day
and with our tongues
to ask, to question,
and to sing all that is praise
while this daylight remains.
Thomas Allbaugh writes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, though since the loss of his youngest son, he has been writing mostly poems. He recently retired from teaching composition and moved to North Carolina.
Amethyst Review 