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Michael Zack

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Medical School

In medical school first you listen,
then you imagine,
reducing yourself to scale.
Next you take a stab
at what’s wrong,
articulating a diagnosis.
And finally you treat.

After trying this on people
a few decades,
successfully I might add,
I realized that in listening, imagining,
reducing scale, diagnosing, treating,
I had been taught,
and had been practising,
not just medicine,
but also poetry.

So I entered this contest
for the greatest poem.
My friend said be clever,
to win you must do a few things.
Never write about love,
at least don’t mention it as such,
change its identity to August corn
or herons in flight.
Use the words ‘shards’ and ‘bone’,
avoid rhymes, use metre,
dialogue in taxi talk
and California speak.

But alas I lost.

Go back, he said,
you must try again.
Initial your first two names,
remove most vowels
from your last name,
tell them you’re from Paraguay.
Change the line endings and
tab the line starts to marginless
asymmetric anarchies.

Yet I lost again.

Perturbed, angry, rebuked,
I dashed off a note
to the committee
voicing my total frustration.
What did they want
I implored? Are there ever
successful poems?
How could one win?
It’s like trying to find a desert,
I finished,
by imagining an ocean
and then taking away the water.

Ah, their responding letter replied,
That’s interesting.

Page(s) 42-43

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