Chess is a score for music. Love is a score for an original twisting. There are twenty-nine people in the room and all are in love but they don’t know. They’re discussing it anyway. (Everyone in this conversation is saying the same thing-- it’s a conversation with adaptation.) Is this my implied contribution? Even the repetition fails as a repetition, and I keep trying to figure the something else, but if you think about instances of rising heat, or art, and they seem contradictory,
they are structured. When one has a target, being in a body, aiming, like this, at several options standing at an open bar, and there is some spectral security lining the walls, wearing the cheap blazers they do, what occurs? There is an image of the body provided by the spray of ordinary skill. I am still in love with a person not in this room, but I do not want to leave where I am. Therefore, I attempt to repeat the repetition of the sense, of myself, and I sweat as though a significant force has been applied to me, and I begin to raise possibilities to someone who is standing near me and who has also stopped moving entirely.
Samaritans
If there is an uninterpretable cry in the City, if there is just one suffering, there will also be men and women going to homes, and heavy breathing, but also light breathing, and smothering, sometimes smothering. Then a little mirror. But it takes so long for anyone to get there, anywhere the ground lifts and the roots pull, that however ordinary the music in the streets, still these men and women must move into the way of things— the passages, the portals, the arrivals
they must repeat. It is this understanding they have of poverty, of the poor in any way, because in time the poor do bring their masters toward them. Into the underground, in the new season, the wind, a changing of positions, and who is going to read it? (Something that happens when one is in close contemplation of the ordinary.) To us there is much praise- worthy in this city, in their women, in their men, in their moaning in any way, but I wonder, anyway, what the answer is for those people in the way of things, for that sight only some of them or us must ever attend to.
Footnote: “Something Else” and “Samaritans” are centos composed of two-, three-, and four- word phrases from a series of lectures on avant-garde literature delivered by University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Emeritus Cyrena Pondrom in 2012. No more than six single-word substitutions were permitted per cento.
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Seth Abramson is a graduate of Harvard Law School and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Seth Abramson is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Thievery(University of Akron Press, 2013), winner of the 2012 Akron Poetry Prize. Series Co-Editor for Best American Experimental Writing (Omnidawn, 2014), he is currently a doctoral candidate in English Literature at University of Wisconsin- Madison.
