The Correspondence-School Instructor Says Goodbye to His Poetry Students

Goodbye, lady in Bangor, who sent me

snapshots of yourself, after definitely hinting

you were beautiful; goodbye,

Miami Beach urologist, who enclosed plain

brown envelopes for the return of your  very

“Clinical Sonnets”; goodbye, manufacturer

of brassieres on the Coast, whose eclogues

give the fullest treatment in literature yet

to the sagging breast motif; goodbye, you in San Quentin,

who wrote, “Being German my hero is Hitler,”

instead of “Sincerely yours,” at the end of long,

neat-scripted letters extolling the Pre-Raphaelites:

I swear to you, it was just my way

of cheering myself up, as I licked

the stamped, self-addressed envelopes,

the game I had of trying to guess

which one of you, this time,

had poisoned his glue. I did care.

I did read each poem entire.

I did say everything I thought

in the mildest words I knew. And now,

in this poem, or chopped prose, no better,

I realize, than those troubled lines

I kept sending back to you,

I have to say I am relieved it is over:

at the end I could feel only pity

for that urge toward more life

your poems kept smothering in words, the smell

of which, days later, tingled in your nostrils

as new, God-given impulses

to write.

Goodbye,

you who are, for me, the postmarks again

of imaginary towns—Xenia, Burnt Cabins, Hornell—

their solitude given away in poems, only their loneliness kept.