Biography I

by Seth Abramson

He was a systems man
               with a system, but a system is not a belief
system. When the rains came everyone was saved
but him, because he wasn’t a boat
a man could fit in. It was certain there was a god—
               there have always been gods. & certainly
there were parents also—

               there have always been people.
But he cleared people away like brush obscuring
               a tomb.
& what was beneath the stone?  A boat.  A belief,
not a system. But the only belief for a systems man
               is circumspection.

 

Seth Abramson is the author of The Suburban Ecstasies (Ghost Road Press, 2009) and a contributing author to The Creative Writing MFA Handbook (Continuum, 2008).  In 2008 he was awarded the J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from Poetry.  A graduate of Harvard Law School and a former public defender, Abramson currently attends the Iowa Writers’ Workshop as a Teaching-Writing Fellow. (6/2009)