Philip Terman: Meeting the Swami

I looked into the swami’s face.
It was a slow burning fire.

“Throw your karma in my basket,” it said.

It was like the garden,
early summer evening,
asking us to sit beside it,
to look closely into it:

Stay and admire me,
now that you are more fully awake.

*

But isn’t there only one God
who cannot be seen, or named—

no flesh, no robe, no incense,
no raga, no dharma,

no private plane, no ashrams,
no holy water

dripped into the hands
of the devotees

waiting in long lines
to look into your holy face?

Only this dusk and fireflies,
these white Madonna lilies,

this dark now descending
and the birdsong?

*

Yet I looked into the swami’s face.
It was red and blissful.
I came from somewhere else.
But in that moment, in that short moment,
I was blissful, too.

*

There’s a white peacock
where the swami is,
strutting wherever it wants

in its luminary regalia,
unaware, like a child,
of the attention it calls

to its display. Against
such color the sky, our skins
disappeared. I watch it linger,

until I arrive back to its source, to India,
or to that place where white
was created.

*

And the temple with ten sides
and windows that reveal
various versions of the sky.

*

There are a thousand pairs of shoes
in front of the open gate
the raagas chant through.

*

I have been responsible for many deaths,
and I fear karma will not be kind to me.
But let us try to emerge from that sadness,
like the bird escaping the netted blueberry bush, and singing.

*

On an evening like this,
one doesn’t know where to start, or finish.

Copyright 2024 Philip Terman