Pondicherry, India

Sitting cross-legged in the bay window
of my Aurobindo Ashram room,
recklessly splurged-on to ride out
a storm of salmonella,
I watched the fog roll in over
the homebound Bay of Bengal fleet.
Fog flattened the scene to a triptych:

white sky

on whitecapped sea

on dark-sand beach.

As night boiled in, the turmoil
in my guts subsided awhile.
With it the seeking hunger
that brought me so far
from Jesus and Marx.
Three panels folded to two, leaving

mist above,

mass below.

Soon, in a mingling of two flows 
like that on Indian roads,
this dialectic blurs,
like the trinity before it,

into one irreducible fog.

But a last red ray stabbed through the grey,

plotting in the French window’s

……peeling Cartesian grid

…………a function bending asymptotic

………………in the thickened glass above the sill,

…………………………………..converging on the origin:

……………………………………………………………………….O, O, O

First published in Soul-lit: a journal of spiritual poetry, volume 31, summer 2022.