Who baked into me the notion
that I must know the name
of a thing to know the thing?

Sure, the specificity of “oriole”
over “bird,” or “catalpa” over “tree”
provides a better visual,

not to mention a sound. It must
have been thanks to my mother
who sent me to the shelf

in the living room where the
creamy World Book encyclopedias
lived, with a resounding,

“Look it up!” whether a word
in the dictionary or a fact about,
say, American history.

I was barely in double digits when
I realized how much our reference
library lacked, not meeting

an atlas until high school. What I
would have given for a substantial
thesaurus, instead of my mother’s

yellowing paperback Roget’s.
And yes, after years of phoning
librarians to fact check all manner

of facts, the miracle of typing a query
into a search engine with a choice
of sources fanned out like a deck of cards

changes everything. But now, on walks,
I try to resist the urge to pull the device
from my pocket to look up the name

of a flower or confirm what year
Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.
The challenge: to sometimes simply be

without knowing, without categorizing,
do more dreaming, not planning.
What matters is pausing to peer

at a still-brilliant whatchamacallit
grinning over a low picket fence
in early November, or beholding

the colors in leaf mélange carpeting
a sidewalk, not to interview it
but simply admire it,

not insist that it tell me its name.