The afternoon is part of a glorious Australian mid-winter monthday and there is a small praying mantis on the underside of the glass tabletop that I am typing seated at. The glass is a particular kind of glass, but I don’t know the name for it, so I search my vocabulary for the closest thing to it and I come up with a stained glass window. I type “glass window types” into google’s image search windowbox, and the very first image that comes up is a mirror image of the glass tabletop that I want to know the name for. When I hover the mouse pointer over the image it pops out a little bit at me exposing: a title dot jpg of glass_623, the domain name dot com that it’s coming from, dimensions of 623 x 319, a caption of textured glass types , and options for Similar and More sizes. I consider these details.
For one thing, the texturedness of the glass is a quality of the glass, so I’m thinking that can’t be the name for the glass. I can think of names for things that are the same as their utility, like hammers and nails, but nothing with a name equivalent to the quality. I presume that’s because things, like textured glass, generally have more than one quality. It could be objected that colours and sounds and flavours can have the same name as their quality, but they’re not really things. They’re the textures of things. Like if I lick a glass tabletop there will be a texture to the flavour. If I hit it there will be a texture to the sound . It clearly has a colour texture, but the overall texture of the glass is not so clear when you try to look through it. The glass is obscure.
Another thing is that the very first image of glass window types came up a perfect portion of the tabletop – and now that I look back at the little praying mantis on the other side of it, it’s in much the same place where the glare from the ceiling light was the other night. Just on the other side of it.

July 29th, 2012 at 6:45 am
once I saw as through a polychrome glass darkly
the waterfall of possible clarity
a mantis preying
a waterfall chandelier
cascade of non-colour tumbling
towards the ceiling in a series of circles
monochrome fumbling greyly towards the green
of a mantis praying.
July 29th, 2012 at 4:18 pm
That is gorgeous, Bonnie. After reflecting on your words for a while… did it look something like this?
Thank you. The dimensions have a texture too!