<barot's "reading plato">
2003-10-25.1:20 p.m.
Reading Plato Rick Barot I think about the mornings it saved me to look at the hearts penknifed on the windows of the bus, or at the initials scratched into the plastic partition, in front of which a cabbie went on about bread his father would make, so hard you broke teeth on it, or told one more story about the plumbing in New Delhi buildings, villages to each floor, his whole childhood in a building, nothing to love but how much now he missed it, even the noises and stinks he missed, the avenue suddenly clear in front of us, the sky ahead opaquely clean as a bottle's bottom, each heart and name a kind of ditty of hopefulness because there was one you or another I was leaving or going to, so many stalls of flowers and fruit going past, figures earnest with destination, even the city itself a heart, so that when sidewalks quaked from trains underneath, it seemed something to love, like a harbor boat's call at dawn or the face reflected on a coffee machine's chrome side, the pencil's curled shavings a litter of questions on the floor, the floor's square of afternoon light another page I couldn't know myself by, as now, when Socrates describes the lover's wings spreading through the soul like flames on a horizon, it isn't so much light I think about, but the back's skin cracking to let each wing's nub break through, the surprise of the first pain and the eventual lightening, the blood on the feathers drying as you begin to sense the use for them.
back /& forth /& frosting
names are often sad