Namaste Bookstore

You’ll take the PATH train to 14th street, and after 
a dollar hot dog or maybe a greasy slice
 
you’ll make your way past the bazaars of used cell phones,
the mounds of goodwill clothes, the sheafs of heavy metal posters
 
until you reach the Namaste Bookstore at the 
corner of 5th. You’ll elbow past the incense sticks, 
 
the reiki kits, the tarot packs and pyramids
to the section they call Eastern Wisdom. This is where
 
Whitman went, and Eliot and Yeats — to mine the golden
seam of wisdom muddled in the
 
New Age dross. And you’ll think, Why can’t my father 
teach me this? Hard-nosed man who daily drove 40 miles
 
to work in a factory, who came home with frostbitten fingers
because the heat didn’t work in his station wagon.
 
The little space within the heart is as great as the vast
universe, the Upanishads say. You like that,
 
so you’ll take the book to the counter where the Tibetan 
man draped in a blanket will ring it up and bless you.
 
And out on the street the drummer from Senegal will
wave to you and write secret mantras with his sticks
 
onto the cold air as the city’s windows redden in the dusk.
When he beats his kit, you’ll hear a background thrum reverberate 
 
up and down Fifth Avenue. This is it, you’ll think, 
as you vibrate like a tuning fork in a primordial sound.