adieu

The Correspondence-School Instructor Says Goodbye to His Poetry Students

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BY GALWAY KINNELL

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.

Last day of class~we uploaded our final blog entries and I sent them off with a kitchen toy of their own. Now to close the dorm for break and fall into a deep spring slumber.