"Reading Plato" by Jorie Graham

This is the story
            of a beautiful
lie, what slips
            through my fingers,
your fingers. It’s winter,
            it’s far

in the lifespan
            of man.
Bareheaded, in a soiled
            shirt,
speechless, my friend
            is making

lures, his hobby. Flies
            so small
he works with tweezers and
            a magnifying glass.
They must be
            so believable

they’re true–feelers,
            antennae,
quick and frantic
            as something
drowning. His heart
            beats wildly
in his hands. It is
            blinding
and who will forgive him
            in his tiny
garden? He makes them
            out of hair,

deer hair, because it’s hollow
            and floats.
Past death, past sight,
            this is
his good idea, what drives
            the silly days

together. Better than memory. Better
            than love.
Then they are done, a hook
            under each pair
of wings, and it’s Spring,
            and the men

wade out into the riverbed
            at dawn. Above
the stars still connect-up
            their hungry animals.
soon they’ll be satisfied
            and go. Meanwhile

upriver, downriver, imagine, quick
            in the air,
in flesh, in a blue
            swarm of
flies, our knowledge of
            the graceful

deer skips easily across
            the surface.
Dismembered, remembered,
            it’s finally
alive. Imagine
            the body

they were all once
            a part of,
these men along the lush
            green banks
trying to slip in
            and pass

for the natural world.

I love this poem by Jorie Graham. I feel like it's very dense with concepts ripe for ecological analysis. Plato's concept of "truth" was one where the "ideal" or the general, universal model of any given object would be considered the "most true." So "tree" is truer than "uprooted crape myrtle." Wikipedia puts it thusly:

"A particular tree, with a branch or two missing, possibly alive, possibly dead, and with the initials of two lovers carved into its bark, is distinct from the abstract form of Tree-ness. A Tree is the ideal that each of us holds that allows us to identify the imperfect reflections of trees all around us."

Plato holds idealism and truth in high regard and at the same time seems to dismiss their existence. In this poem, though, Jorie Graham tends to take more of a side on the issue, diminishing the value of truth and juxtaposing the archetypal "puppet master" as a possible puppet in a larger puppet show. I'm referring here to Plato's allegory of the cave in which people chained up in a cave may only see shadows of things that occur behind him, and those shadows are the truth. One of the chained people would call a shadow of a tree just a tree, whereas the person lighting the "real" tree to cast the shadow would have a more omniscient standpoint. When Jorie Graham describes the constellations that act as decoys on the fisherman, who are throughout the poem creating and using decoys for fly-fish, she calls to question the existence of an absolute truth, as well as equates the value of objects such as men, stars, flies, deer, rivers, and lures.

This in mind, the poem's last line definitely calls into question the tendency of humans to separate themselves from nature. The men in this poem try to return to a truth of oneness between man and nature, unaware that there is and cannot be a separation between the two. That "truth" is just the shadow of something truer, something unable to be known.