I mistake adult crane flies for mosquitoes, ignoring that a crane fly’s stillness makes the sound of information gathering, the clue.
Clue is a name for the patience I lack, arriving a cappella—the highest note struck by a boy who knows his voice will crack, but nonetheless goes on polishing thinner and thinner its porcelain.
I’ve never called out my own names, all at once, the way a female insect will lay hundreds of eggs, which hatch together in their season, as larvae, and burrow.
The problem of recognition incubates in each of its egg sacs differently. These can be found hanging from named as well as unnamed branches, among the dense purposes that camouflage them.
Shadows on the eaves of my neighbor’s house are already digesting purpose as I watch evening become recognizable, and daylight come apart.
The female crane fly’s larvae burrow into the ground or into decaying wood, in no need of, nor under any obligation to the sanction of name or law.
Isolated within its call to immediacy, a name is an orientation-limit, presenting something that, either by rights or point of fact, is now inconsequent.
My hands reach out in their own directions, never complicit with the names I’ve given them.
The prefix “re-” in recognition means to know again, to reach back and forwards at once, directionality splayed.
A well-struck glass will ring with the sound of pure dispersal. How to say my name with that force and disappear as a vibration radiating, freed from solidity.
A crane fly is in my ceiling’s corner, too far from the open front door, too disinterested in my waving and prompting, my increasingly violent provocations, to be frightened outside.
The light from the open door has cast the fly’s wings in shadow, which is what naming does to the absences within a thing.
Difficult to distinguish those from the absences I make by trying to recognize it.
the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan
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