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.

The poem's brevity is its argument: vision arrives unnamed, and naming is always an afterthought — something you go and look up. The casual 'But then' of the second line is what makes it more than an observation; it shrugs at the entire project of interpretation, suggesting that the gap between experience and language is not tragic but simply the way things are.