Dear Professor

You with your fine degrees,
your carefully fashioned attitude,
your poem forthcoming in The New Yorker?
You, with your world-weary disappointment,
discouragement, disdain—words that start with D—
was this the way you taught, as though you knew
the secrets but would not consider
wasting them on me, my poems so poor
(implied perfectly) that you had no
advice to offer, no direction (another D).

Your ear, you said, is good—and then you shrugged
that comment off, not knowing what I might
do with it. I have two ears
and if I don’t remember all the words
you said that afternoon, I recall
your innuendo dripping like rain
from the tree limbs outside—if it was raining.
I was raining a salt tide inside—to dive
into melodrama, I could call it
a sea. I would say I was drowning,
floundering in my dismay.

How could you
think I’d recover, wash up on some rocky beach
and learn slowly to breathe again, let
the ocean’s roar out of my blood. Years
later, I bought your book, a little spasm
of masochism. I can’t say
I understood a single poem.
Maybe you were right I’d never amount
to much—not the fabulous academy
prize-winning award-laden poet
with a capital P, but thank God
I don’t write like you.