Reading Plato

I think about the mornings it saved meto look at the hearts penknifed on the windowsof the bus, or at the initials scratched

into the plastic partition, in front of whicha cabbie went on about bread his fatherwould make, so hard you broke teeth on it,

or told one more story about the plumbingin New Delhi buildings, villages to each floor,his whole childhood in a building, nothing to

love but how much now he missed it, eventhe noises and stinks he missed, the avenuesuddenly clear in front of us, the sky ahead

opaquely clean as a bottle’s bottom, each heartand name a kind of ditty of hopefulnessbecause there was one you or another I was

leaving or going to, so many stalls of flowersand fruit going past, figures earnest withdestination, even the city itself a heart,

so that when sidewalks quaked from trainsunderneath, 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 litterof questions on the floor, the floor’s square

of afternoon light another page I couldn’t knowmyself by, as now, when Socrates describesthe lover’s wings spreading through the soul

like flames on a horizon, it isn’t so much lightI think about, but the back’s skin crackingto let each wing’s nub break through,

the surprise of the first pain and the eventuallightening, the blood on the feathers dryingas you begin to sense the use for them.