Steven C. Reese, “First Congress of New Words After Babel

First Congress of New Words After Babel

Steven C. Reese

Called by the suddenly seventy ways to say table, they sit, done streaming like unseen bats out the tower’s windows. Gorgeous day. Light licks them to a sheen of multiplied senses, sounds with a mind to play

and talk of roots, kinship, accent, nuance, aptness for figures, issues of timbre, tone, weight. Polysyllables work kinks from their joints, birth-sore. Some contemplate a larger meaning, the shared life of the sentence.

A few jokers lobby for elections of officers; the different tongues laugh the same laugh, a fact which escapes no one’s attention (ditto the fact that if in each language leaks a pheromone for which none

present is the word, but all feel the buzz of pure possibility it gives them). To some the thought of usefulness occurs, and grows. Others are right at home being words for their own sake, just signs, just because.

And while the superlatives think too well of themselves and certain verbs lack a direction, that they all mean what they say, and in good will, is never in question. Their hubbub is the babble of innocents, still.

They are too new, still drying in the sun, awkward with one another, awed with being there at all, to think on why, to imagine the mind that would prepare so dire and perverse a smack-down; that would fashion

understanding’s overthrow through increase of its means—these very words—by seventy-fold. The ends they’ll be used for they can’t yet guess, turned stones in the mouth, hurled to do hurt or set to build walls, borders; the peace

they’ll break, the progress they’ll thwart; the low tricks, the lies, quarrels, secrets, passwords, slanders, curses. For ignorance, that shut door, they’ll be locks. For might’s carriage, horses. They’ll be the hissed language of what’s said behind backs.

But they don’t know this yet. They are many and giddy, quick to connect, riding their updraft of vowel, a new day’s vocabulary. Name and thing feel no rift. The ifs charge the air with a sense of what might be.