Seth Abramson

The Something Else

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. He 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.