I've Never Known The Name

A three-line poem observing that no vision has ever arrived with a name, but that names can always be looked up afterward — placing experience before language.

A three-line joke that doubles as an epistemology of the visionary. The speaker has 'never known the name of any vision' he has had - but the wry recovery, 'But then I can always go and look it up,' deflates the mystic posture into a reference-desk shrug. The poem lets revelation and the dictionary occupy the same shelf, and the comedy is that both seem equally available and equally beside the point.