Squeamish in the Name of Science

"Why did you become a writer?" asks my mother
who wanted me to become a doctor.


I rejected all my mother's hopes

Of ever making it to fame and security

As a noble physician

the day that they put a scalpel in my hands and

Directed me to the fetal pig lying cold and blue on

The table in front of me

I watched aghast as the pretty Asian girls cut

Away with the precision of Swiss-watchmakers

And carved out heart, lungs, liver.

My attempts at surgery produced hackings of flesh,

Unevenly, jaggedly hopeless

My lab professor shook her head and sighed

I went home crying and vomited out my dinner.


(In college, Mother, I barely made it through first-year biology.)


But when I write,

I find I have the courage of a heart surgeon

as I cut, stitch, cleave together words

I can heal with a phrase, an image,

A well-sung metaphor.

It's so easy

All I have to do is close my eyes, imagine a scene

And then paint it with fragments of my imagination

It's like breathing, like praying,

Like being in a trance

Like love, it takes me and uses me

And I am happy to be used.


(In college, Mother, I won every writing competition I entered.)


Part science, part art

Part religion

Fully me

I am no longer squeamish in the name of science

Because my science has shifted

From the diseases of the flesh to the ills of the spirit

And I am as much a doctor to people's souls

As doctors, Mother, minister to their bodies.