Night I

Last August, among crowds
of refugees from our culture, among the hum: their
third eyes nodding in syncopation
to the rhythm of the music drifting from the colored bus
the chant of the wandering monk, o
the guttering midnight wind and
the pulsation of a secret:
one inward heart beating through the machine
and briefly painting flames across the sky
it stained black by infinity,
by the letters describing each possibility
they ran together to form
a bottomless sea, a spiral void, a tube;

it was among this I burst open
alone
and the lotus within me flowered.