The Correspondence-School Instructor Says Goodbye to His Poetry Students

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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.

© Washington Allston