Reading Plato - 'Some Poems I love Best'

[jjhunter]

Posted by jjhunter on behalf of Luisa A. Igloria.

For my second post, I'd like to offer a slightly reworked excerpt from a chapter I published on "Some Poems I Love Best" (in 7 x 10: World Poetry Choices by Seven Filipino Poets, ed. Alfred Yuson)--- this one a reading of Rick Barot's poem "Reading Plato".

I first read Rick Barot’s poem “Reading Plato,” from his book The Darker Fall which won the 2001 Kathryn Morton Poetry Prize from Sarabande Books, ten years ago when the poem was published in an issue of Poetry journal, and then again a few months after when “Reading Plato” appeared on the National Endowment for the Arts website (he was one of the poetry grant recipients then). I remember wondering if he might be Filipino or Filipino American—as it turns out he is, though this is not the most consequential thing about my ability to appreciate his work. Shortly after that I became friends with Rick through a Filipino American writers electronic listserve. Reading The Darker Fall, I was struck by the many images in it of bird trochees, phantasmal cities, light filtered through tea-water— the work of the invisible, like wind or color on prosaic surfaces so that they become both animate and intimate.

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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,

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