Meanwhile - from SD

Envoi

Are you reading this to see, friend, if
you want to ramble through what's inside?
Fair enough. It's not a page turner I'm after,
nor airport fiction. I'm after undoing words,
so that contexts both make them transparent
and invite colors and projections of heart.
And more, smear the palette of mere being.

Mayday, and all the alarms in the world
going off at once are morning birds
in Delta bluffs woods, taking me out
to the bothy to watch waves on the lake,
and a pontoon gliding into an easterly,
on westering waters. The boat moves
to the east all morning tied to the dock.

Until I ask what science traffics in
deliberate misunderstandings, incorporates
illusions that the senses verify, purposes
to undo "the real world," as parents say.
What is proved more than the worlds it takes
to stay in place, and the worlds moved
to life by the eye stayed in watching.

Gordon Osing

Gordon Osing is retired from the writing program at the University of Memphis
and lives now lakeside in Delta bluffs woods in Eudora, Mississippi, where he is
continuing his career in reading and writing and traveling. The River City Writers Series,
that he began some thirty-five years ago at the University of Memphis, is still thriving.
He sees himself in a continuation of the works of the Southern Modernists, holding
language in poetry as re-contextualized, and the poem as artifact with its own protocols
and reasons, the ways and means of a poem's attachments to "truth" belonging peculiarly
to poetry. Another recent collection is titled Slaughtering the Buddha (SD, 2010).