1. I had a notion for a bird in flight and started sketching turkey vultures.
2. I hadn’t yet gotten close enough to render proper plumage, and then there was the problem of altitude.
3. I needed a bird to study how the feathers lay across the wings, different from how they lay on the head, and to get the six-foot wing span to feel surreal and real.
4. His red helmet, silvery tail feathers, finger-like wingtip feathers, and brown skirt feathers.
5. I needed to see for myself the tearing, the blunted talons, the bird inside the bird.
6. Karl had an idea. We laid out a trap with his heifer’s placenta, and caught one.
7. For weeks, I fed him raw meat and pretended there was no terror in his eyes. For weeks, every dream featured his grunting and pacing.
8. I wanted to understand heights. The cartography of wing to tail, the turn of the raptor’s head, to see what’s possible overhead, what soars inside our dreams, where Pennsylvania hills can feel invented and the time of day dour.
9. Wanted to study the bird’s features so that I could position him in a way that would evoke a soaring, which would lead to a painting in which you hear the whirling, languorous wings.
10. Three of them, a kettle, above John Andress’ house.
11. When I thought it was nearly completed, Pa said, “Andy, that doesn’t work. That’s not a painting.”
12. He wanted less blue, less bird. By the time I finished it, he’d been dead a few years.
13. With him gone, every new sky is a reason for vultures and clouds.
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6., 7., 10. Whiting, Cécile. “Andrew Wyeth and Birds of War.” Panorama, (Vol. 7, No. 2), 2021, journalpanorama.org/article/andrew-wyeth-and-birds-of-war.
11. Meryman, Richard. Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life. HarperCollins, 1998, p. 160.
Janée J. Baugher is the author of the only craft book of its kind, The Ekphrastic Writer: Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction (McFarland, 2020). She’s an assistant editor at Boulevard magazine, has been a featured poet at the Library of Congress, and the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture awarded her a 2024–2025 CityArtist grant. For her third poetry collection, The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles, Baugher won Tupelo Press’s 2023 Dorset Prize (forthcoming in 2026).
