On Plato and Poetry

Plato avows that poetry is a sham;
a mirror of a mirror, twice removed
from Truth. Of course, if you believe, like him,
reality is really that realm of Ideas,
And poetry represents this world of gross
material, then what can it seem to you
But counterfeit of counterfeit of Truth?
Yet Aristotle tells us poetry is
the mash of history and philosophy:
the universal lumped into the concrete.
If that is so, why poetry has no choice
but lie, and in so doing tell the truth.
So Plato plays the Socrates, and Ion,
Glaucon, Protagoras, Crito, Meno,
servants, slaves, kings, Athenians and Greeks
and foreign men−lying to us, because
the fact is they are not themselves but Plato,
Plato who knows full well his dialogues
are plays, his characters are parts, the actors
are his reader's minds, and knows that he
can show the truth by telling lies. You see,
when Socrates expelled the poets from
his city, he did so in poetry,
and he himself was Plato's poem−
he was inviting us to view the truth
behind his lie, and see that poetry,
like some old man who tells some kid
a made-up fable to instruct, who could
be you, or me, or Socrates, does lie
in story, but it leaves instruction for
the taking. So does Plato, never saying
what is it that he means or where he stands,
to show that since the universal in
concreteness lives and by concreteness is
perceived, and poetry never aims
at being true in the concrete, it's free
from truth to show the truth by saying false:
the truth is that in fiction lies the truth.

Climbing

Time has come to stop and go. To stop
still waiting for the time to come, and go
and come to time myself. Climb to the top
of the hill, having arrived there on, you know,
my own, for as the saying goes, the hill
does not respond even to that prophet's word−
why would it then attend to mine? The will
that doesn't move will win, and that unheard
will−can do nothing but consent. So this
is me going the distance, watching far
in the horizon as the mountain bliss
draws closer, closer drawing where we are.
            Though time is ever moving and unmoved,
            By going to it comes, that's how it's moved.

Off the Glass

The sun, reflected off a car window,
and then reflected off a flat window−
it sparks a flash within my bathroom door.
This sudden blindness, gone in a blink, calls for
an explanation, something to bring me to ground,
and that rebound−that was the cause I found.
How powerful the sun, to reach me at
a third-step remove in place from where he sat,
Three windows distant from his burning glory.
A power so great is bound to reach my body,
And burn my cells just like the sun does not.
            It fires up my blood with living fun,
            Alive from the flaming energy of the sun,
            To tell the world that life has just begun.