It started for me when my niece was diagnosed with breast cancer.  Then my agent was diagnosed with lung cancer.  Then my best friend got pancreatic cancer.  Then a poet with whom I have been friendly for years, who was also my student, got cancer all through his gut.  Then another good friend, a gay man I must have dinner with at least twenty-five times a year, was told he had melanoma.  All this in the span of two years.  I feel like I’m on some unrecognized battlefield with medics carrying off everyone I know to go under the knife and be assaulted with chemo poisons and radiation, time after time. We are at war and don’t realize it, I think.  They are every bloody one of them younger than me, some considerably younger. I stare in the mirror, I peel back my sweater and stare at my breasts and my belly wondering what foul growth is attacking me invisibly.  I cannot be immune when around me the wounded are falling. But inside I’m still thirty-five.  I remember when I could climb mountains for the view, when I could hike twelve miles on the Robbers Road in Scotland, when I could wander the local woods half the day and come home to fuck all evening.  That’s who I really am, even if no one can see it, including me with my arthritic knees. We made war on the environment and now the environment is at war with us.  Retaliation for the extinction of animals and plants necessary to the environment. Dumping of drugs into streams and rivers.  Overfishing.  Toxic chemicals in the air, the water, the soil.  Poisons everywhere that we consume in our food and water, through our skin, breathe in, that rub off on us. Corporate profits, corporate greed that we eat, that we drink, that we breathe, that we wear. The storms grow worse and worse, hurricanes, nor’easters, blizzards, sand storms, tornadoes.  Fires burn quickly and spread ferociously in the drought from deserts in which we build homes and demand green lawns.  We might as well drink the oil straight from the wells, be smeared with it like the dying water birds.  We are consuming that oil every day through our noses and our skin.  We run nuclear power plants that produce spent rods and waste that will be leaking radiation for thousands of years.  What immensely dirty creatures we are.  We are dying of our own waste products.