Goodbye
—after Akhmadulina
Some things you don’t come back from.
The body carries on. Of late
it even travels, basks in light.
But knock and there’s no one home.
(How did I love you? With the taste
of iron on my tongue. Try again.
How did I love you? Like a man
destroying what he tries to save.)
The head still does light labor.
But often both the hands fall slack,
and all five senses, in a flock,
go south to weather winter.
Copyright © 2025 by Geoffrey Brock. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 29, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I first came across Bella Akhmadulina’s 1960 poem ‘Прощание’ in Jean Valentine’s haunting 1966 adaptation, also called ‘Goodbye,’ which inspired me to look up other versions as well. Both the poem’s numb grief, apparently inspired by an abortion that led to the disintegration of [Akhmadulina]’s marriage to Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and its tightly rhymed quatrains put me in mind of [Emily] Dickinson’s poem ‘After great pain a formal feeling comes.’ In my own adaptation, which inhabits a personal failure, I took a quite different approach, paring the original ruthlessly down but also trying to evoke something of its formal feeling.”
—Geoffrey Brock
Geoffrey Brock
Geoffrey Brock was born in Atlanta in 1964. His first book of poetry, Weighing Light (Ivan R. Dee, 2005), received the 2004 New Criterion Poetry Prize.