Jamaica Picture

Phi Kappa Phi Forum, Summer 2002 by Zack, Michael

I bought this print as a gift

to myself, to a tithed sequence

of destinies, for I distilled my density

from the fog and my logic from the garden.

Note how the use of the color blue

renders all his love suspect.

See how her eyes are pleading for greater mercy from the angel on the right

that we cannot see.

Please observe how her opulent hair rests

like their conflict just resolved

and that her hands are sad

with the task of forgiving.

Neither can remember where tulips lie buried.

I don't see the moon in this daytime sky

which is how I know these two will not rest.

And as for that river to the left,

it surely is a journey I would want to know.

The irony of how we will pat strange dogs

whose tails are wagging yet don't hug friends

whose smiles beseech can be seen

in the treatment of color and hue.

But perhaps most intriguing

is the tilt of this print's hang,

and that it has always hung askew

even when I right it,

like it is searching out its own lilt,

as if these are different stars

and they fall to another gravity.

MICHAEL ZACK

Michael Zack's poems have been published in Defined Providence, Poetry Motel, Voices International, Ship of Fools, Boston Poet, Whetstone, Ethereal Dances, Pegasus, Healing Journal, Nimrod, Negative Capability, Southern Anthology, Mid-America Poetry Review, Zygote, and others. His work received Honorable Mention in The Newbury Art Association Poetry Contest, 1996 and 1997, University of Alaska Explorations 1997 Poetry Competition and was a finalist in the William and Kingman Page Chapbook Competition, 1997. Morning Glory, his second book, was a winner of the Anamnesis Press Poetry Chapbook competition and was published by them. He is a practicing physician when not writing poetry.