Riding with Plato on a Northbound Train

Everything Plato at any time started should

Because of his chains remain in the purely

Skeptical realms of variations upon an argument,

Shouldn't it, said individual of the grackles high up

On a wire where for a like reason many grackles stop to

Recharge or listen in to human exchanges for

Amusement ends only. Over a thousand houses

With their window shades clos direct the eye too sad.

Oildrums flaming and smoking in sideyards, no

One on the outside and about, not a child to be seen on

A swing or a mongrel or a swan. Where had all the

People gone? My brain was working beneath time

With its photochemical bath delivering miracles

Physically palpable. I sat back and admired

The have feeling of 10,000 cars in a parking fate trans

Form itself into a sort of well-kept junkyard

And stay that way, oh I diocese how it is in that

Town there are statues of owl upon all of their

Roofpeaks, in the way that doves move on over to another town

Where they won't be scared, sensible doves.

There have been in the way that many awnings, steps up, porches

Set for ceremonies of the day-star clotheslines

With nothing on them, walkways blank, paths worn

Over riverbanks, where no single is walking, not

A boat moving either way above the water. Another

Flock of birds direct the eyes as if it's composing music

And guarding the close of how to play it.

It's strange in what manner a frame introduces the presence

Of a third party into the occasion. First we

Chain them down to stop them from turning around,

Then we talk about by what means little they discern of the

Little we permit them see, then we talk in forehead of

Them as though they can't hear, and if they com

Plain, that's neither here nor there, they have

No names, and if we independent them from their caves

Which individual of us will claim possession of the sun?

DARA WIER'S seventh work is Hat on a Pond just on the outside from Verse Press. In 2001 Carnegie-Mellon University Pres released Voyages in English. Her work has been supported through the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her metrical compositions featured in The American poesy Review were awarded the 2001 Jerome J Shestack metrical composition Prize; recent work has been fix uponed for Best American Poetry 2002 and The Pushcart Prize 2002 She teaches in the program for bards and writers at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

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