Babel is a story about vast ambition, and Dave Bonta squeezes it onto a chessboard. The tower in the first line is "homely / in a chess set," which makes it the rook, the plainest and squarest piece, the one that only moves in straight lines. A skyscraper aimed at heaven is now a small carved object on a table. The word "homely" does a lot of the work here. It is a domestic, slightly apologetic word, and it makes the great monument of human pride look like something you could pick up and put in a box. Even the material is modest. Marl is a crumbly mix of clay and lime, hardly the stuff of lasting monuments.
The rhythm of the next line acts out what it describes. "Fuddled, talking, the others fell" begins with two falling beats, FUD-dled, TALK-ing, and then tips over on "fell." The diction is just as telling. In Genesis, the builders are punished with a confusion of languages. Here the confusion is a muddled, chatty drunkenness, closer to a party gone slack than to a divine thunderbolt. "Fell" works on two levels, since the speakers collapse like the builders of Babel and also like captured pieces taken off a board.
The second stanza, only two lines long, is the quietest part of the poem. "The tower we made is quiet" is flat and almost tender, and the "we" is startling, because the first stanza gave us no one to belong to. Then the pronoun narrows to "I": "Overcome with drink, I ride in." The speaker seems to be a knight, the one piece that rides, and also a drunk stumbling into the empty building. "Overcome" is double-edged, since it means both intoxicated and conquered. The reader can't tell whether this is an invasion, a homecoming or a collapse, and the poem doesn't say. The slide from nobody to "we" to "I" to "a man" means no single voice holds steady for long, which suits a poem about the breakdown of shared speech.
The third stanza returns to the tower, now patient: it "stood waiting," like a piece that has not yet been moved. Then comes the dry, sententious line "A man respects the discourse / of so many cavaliers." It sounds like a proverb, but it is faintly ridiculous. "Discourse" is a formal, scholarly word, set against the earlier "fuddled, talking," and "cavaliers" adds swagger. It also carries the sense of cavalier as careless or offhand, so the knights are both horsemen and people who don't much care. Even the etymology fits. "Discourse" comes from a Latin word for running to and fro, which is a good description of both conversation and a crowd of riders. And "so many" is funny, because no chess set holds a crowd of knights. The board has quietly turned into a mob.
The poem is built without rhyme or a regular meter. Its stanzas run three lines, two lines, three lines, and its lines are short, often broken mid-thought ("homely / in a chess set"; "the discourse / of so many cavaliers"). That gives it a halting, slightly tipsy gait, and it uses plain, mostly one- and two-syllable words. The repeated "tower," which appears in the first line, the fourth and the sixth, is the one fixed point. Everything around it changes, from chess piece to monument, from "we" to "I," from fallen talkers to a crowd of horsemen, while the tower stays put.
That may be the poem's main idea, and it quietly reverses the old story. In the usual version of Babel the building fails and the people are scattered. Here the structure outlasts the speakers. What remains is silence, and into that silence comes someone too drunk, or too dazed, to say what he is doing there. The poem sounds amused, even affectionate, about human ambition and human noise, and it suggests that the things we build may be more patient than the people who talk about them.
Its significance lies in how much it leaves unsaid. In a handful of short lines it turns a famous myth into a game, a drinking song and a small act of respect, and it never explains itself. A poem about the failure of language to explain things is wise to stay a little unexplained.