Babel, by JeFF Stumpo

​Babel

In Borges’s famous library,
each room bounded by six walls,
the books containing every combination
of twenty-six letters and some punctuation,
you can find, somewhere, your life’s story
if only you look hard enough.

Look hard enough
and your life is, in a way, a library,
a repository
for various tales contained between books’ walls,
your birth and death a sort of punctuation,
you some combination

of G, A, T, and C. You are a combination
lock on a restricted section. Therapy and enough
time, and someone will pick it, puncture
the silence of your mind’s library
and its walls
of shelves. The checking in and out is itself a story.

Or consider the way someone looks at the images in a story
about a mill, a hotel, a temple, all these combinations
of rot, and finds the beauty therein, walls
barely bearing the load, but just enough
that someone can sneak safely in, find the heart of a library
beating softly like punctuation.

The magic is that in the chaos we call life, there is still punctuation
in the framing of a picture or a story,
how we can focus on a pair of glasses in a library
or go wide as a whole country. We combine
near and far, yours and mine, excess and not enough,
sometimes in the same breath. We build walls

only to keep up the roof. We build walls
like parentheses, bowed, ourselves an aside. Our punctuation
lets us know when enough is enough,
when it’s time to stop the story,
when it’s time to let someone else find a combination
of words that makes sense of our tattered books. Libraries

are not just stacks of books like towers, enough walls
to keep us in. A library is a collective mind, punctuating
all our stories, all of them, all our possible combinations.

JeFF Stumpo

JeFF Stumpo is a survivor of psychosis and PTSD, husband to a PhD chemist, and father to an amazing trans child. He’s the author of five chapbooks of poetry (most through Seven Kitchens Press) and a spoken word album. He has a (poor) website at www.JeFFStumpo.com.