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ARTS AND CULTURE

The sunroom monk's cell

01 September 2020

Selected poems

Ask the engine

What is the capital of Burkina Faso? My ignorance gnaws

until I click and type. Ouagadougou, that’s the joint —

I never know how much I don’t know, until I know.

What does HDMI stand for? Give me a sec —

High-Definition Multimedia Interface!

Now I know, until I don’t — that is, forget.

Genius is only as deep as its memory.

Wikipedia is a bigger library than Alexandria,

British Museum and Library of Congress.

Over coffee I find articles on Gilgamesh —

Sumerian, you know — and Tom de Quincey,

opium-eater; slowly I approach omniscience.

Stephen Hawking could teach me nothing.

Einstein? I would have loved to chat.

And the disciplines — across the population

one for every seven souls on earth.

Kundalini, Zen, Iyengar, squats and lunges,

mindfulness for scatterbrains, loosening up

for starchies, how to get and grasp the now.

I click, I copy, I get the posture right.

All departments of the self unite and sigh.

So much can be clicked and done —

does anything resist the search, say God?

At once I find him her or it defined,

with lists of attributes and qualities

both dry and wet: justice and compassion;

not material or spiritual, says one site.

Info piles on info — I crave more.

Clickety clack, the mouse is scurrying,

I can’t decide what to try downloading:

a library of sounds is there, smells not yet.

Our fingertips will walk to all experiences

including the divine — but what’s the guarantee?

If it feels like God, can I say it is?

I wish I’d never clicked for Ouagadougou.

While I was musing

(Psalm 39)

While I was musing I heard scratching noises,

faint, bothersome, at the mind’s edge,

rather like mice nibbling and scuttling,

or polter-somethings working through the ceiling.

Then my nostrils tingled — hints of a smell,

or one remembered or imagined.

We musers are too easily distracted —

I couldn’t find the track I’d beaten through the chaff,

to do with family stuff I think: regret, some guilt,

how to escape or neutralise them?

Muse, we sluggards, till the dying of the light,

or — whichever is sooner — till boredom rules.

I close my eyes, the slow movie changes.

Thin puffs of smoke rise up, seen virtually,

eddying about, caressing, threatening.

No sign of where they came from,

but apparently they’re going somewhere.

I want that feeling too — let me follow.

Musing, meditating, contemplating

can be traps to lure us to vainglory,

but here in this sunroom monk’s cell

my grip on ego, or its on me

is loosening perhaps, in smoky trails.

I am so quiet it almost hurts.

What is The Way? I’d settle for a way

out of old confusions, rustier with age