IF YOU NEED IT

If you need it you’ll find it, I learned

from the Rolling Stones, oh yes, years

after Philosophy 101, I got it from LPs

threaded through and through by steel spindles

turning turning the needlepoint wisdom

transmitted through mesh-covered boxes

encasing tweeters and woofers as if

all the avian and—what’s the dog world called?

fidelity—were being brought to bear in our

search for food, soul food, that is, the sort

found incidentally in famed foraging scenes

of yore as we began copying trees and standing upright

seeing over the tops of wheat ears—beer

would come first, bread much later,

but the yeast the rising agent was born

in a kind of omnipresence that preoccupied us...

I was going to say in a kind of thing-ness

as in “everything” but that feels so mathematical

so Phoenician sheep-traderish. No, no,

the world that truly nourishes us is not made of things.

There’s another bigger essence, isn’t there,

and if you need it you will not only find it,

it will find you, but you will recognize it

there in the laughter of taboos broken

in rush light or candle light

our collective habits acted out

made fun of in the dark

we might even pay good money to sit there

burning our foreheads on the intense glow.