As a physician, it is my job to gather information and make decisions based on organized thinking and to do so in a timely manner, often in 10 or 15 minutes. My day is filled with a multitude of different stories from two dozen patients and I am supposed to filter out less pertinent information and reach logical conclusions based on things I can see and measure. My choices are evidence-based and always focused on the same goal--a healthier patient.

My decisions in poetry, if not exactly the opposite, are quite different. There is no proof, no path, no plan for a satisfiying poem, for a poem that surprises me. I can't follow a linear decision process to get there and this pleases me. I am quite lost most ofthe time while I'm writing a poem and it feels lovely.It feels like I make decisions in poems not just froma different part of my brain, but from an entirelydifferent brain. My satisfaction in medicine is built on competence and confidence; my satisfaction inpoetry is built on being disoriented and curious and trying to find my way.

Being sick, being a patient, is a lonely business. As a patient, you are suddenly displaced from the land of the well to the land of the ill; you can see the well going about their business, but you feel unseen. All the rules have changed. I think writing, when it is going well, also feels like this--lonely and closer to death and closer to life at the same time. As a physician, I feel priviledged to have an intimate connection with patients living in the land of the ill, to help make that journey less lonely, when I can. Good doctoring often means being a good witness. When I am writing from a true place, about things I don't understand, that loneliness feels useful; it helps me witness the poem unfolding.