I've Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature

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These essays first appeared, in earlier drafts, in the following books and journals: American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Northwest Review, poemmemoirstory, River Styx, Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction, and Tin House. I would like to thank the editors of those publications for their scrupulous attention to my prose, and thanks also to the other people who looked at these essays as I thought my way through them: Ed Brunner, Scott Chambers, Sandra Fisher, Angus Heriot, Dorianne Laux, Maria McLeod, Marva Nelson, Suzanne Paola, James Rudy, Ben Sonnenberg. Steve Howie is the person to be either thanked or blamed for first suggesting to me that my life was interesting when I never would have thought it so.

Right now, a tiger named Andrea who lives in the Portland Zoo is dying of cancer in her uterus. The zookeepers might have caught the disease earlier if only she hadn’t kept it hidden, but animals are programmed not to give away their symptoms lest their predators take notice and begin the chase. There is a biological imperative that drives us not to show any traces of our pains, not to reveal any clues about our grip on existence having weakened. In the wild, the lame are quickly eaten, an efficient solution to the problem of disease, without even a need for cleaning up, thanks to the carrion-eaters and then the microbes.

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