A Very Young Man, A Very Fair Woman

                   At the same moment
the night cries of the man and the street cries
of something that may be a man,
so the man in his drawers or half out of them
leans out the fire escape to see
whether there is something out in the darkness
as terrified as he is, and there is,
                   a woman,
she has been leapt on by a cat,
and he in his dreams has been leapt on by a cat,
and this is what cats are,
                                  everywhere. In the morning
the man has ideas about women that are deadly
inaccurate—
for the man who has nicked himself in his sleep
with a fingernail
has an imprecise sense of all things. And the cat,
who’s been nicked by the point
                   of a lady’s umbrella,
has an idea about rain that is more weathercock
than a windfall. And the wind continues its exit
between them all, between the man and the cat
and the woman
                   and their dreams.

Lecture

There is no such thing as empty.

He maintains there is an always
he hears.

Apparently, my blood.

I am sufficient to be heard.

Some text.

There are no blank pages in texts.

Your fundamental point is
an absence, a kind of whispering.

One conclusion is that we never
get away from either.

We confer activities on space.

The absolute of
presence is impossible to ignore.

There is a process in which habit
is not controlling.

In the middle of page forty-six.

To attend to every reflection is
an ethical responsibility.

You see it writ large in this space.

I leave it to performers to choose
the sounds.  

Seth Abramson is the author of Thievery (University of Akron Press, 2013), winner of the 2012 Akron Poetry Prize, and Northerners (Western Michigan University Press, 2011), winner of the 2010 Green Rose Prize from New Issues. He is also Series Co-Editor for Best American Experimental Writing (Omnidawn, 2014).