How It Works:

1. Read the poem 

2. Do your own reflection on it, noting what it inspires in you

3. Feel free to use your own reflection as your prompt or…

4. Use the selection of prompts below

5. Pick one that inspires you and write (feel free to use only one or write several poems using different prompts) or…

6. Don’t use any of the provided prompts and follow your inspiration from wherever it comes

I Could Let You Go

as if opening a crepe sail
on a raft of linden
downriver with no
glacial cut swerve down
soft like bourbon if I could
ask the waters then
to chop to shake
an apology when you cry
I feel a wet bank in me
ring dry here I’ll wrap you
in the piano shawl from the upright
to your fists a spray
of dandelion and comb my last
compassion to grasp.
Goodbye, friend. Willows
dip to your lips
dew from their leafed
digits feast now
on the cold blue soup
of sky the iron from bankwater
gilts your blood I’ll break
a bottle on your gunwale
and read broken
poems from the shore
as the dark river
curls back white from the cheap timber
as if letting what’s made to drift
drift.

—Thomas Dooley
https://thomasdooleypoet.com

If you wish to attend the read around (t’s free, fun, a great way to share, and reading a poem is optional). Note: If you registered already, you do not need to register again, simply use the link sent to you in your confirmation email. Register Here:

Next Read-Around is 10/16/25 at 5:00 PM PST

My Thoughts

Rituals of greeting and parting are part of our every day exchanges with people we meet. Some are strangers we may never see again, in which case a goodbye may be permanent. But in most of our interactions with acquaintances, friends, and loved ones, parting is  just a temporary interruption in our ongoing interaction. In those cases, we may acknowledge the continuity with the equivalent of “see you later.” Then there are cases in which a permanent goodbye may be necessary in order to acknowledge an ending to a relationship or to a previous form of a relationship. Thomas Dooley said he wrote the poem I Could Let You Go to “imagine a ritual for saying goodbye” that could become “something more, something sturdy, like a vessel that could hold and carry away something heavy.“

Poetry is one of the best ways to close out a heavy chapter in a relationship. Dooley’s poem does this brilliantly, not only in the imagery of a raft drifting away, but in his jarring ambiguities, odd line breaks and broken syntax that captures some of the nuance and complexities in relationships that make saying goodbye so difficult and yet sometimes so necessary. The use of that modal operator of possibility in the title, I could let you go, aptly expresses the conflicted nature of these goodbyes.  This is where ritual can help by providing a container to ring dry the wet bank in us, allow us to break a bottle on the hull, bless the vessel  and release it for its onward journey. 

Prompt Ideas

1. Journal or write a poem about greetings and partings, wherever that may lead you.

2. Consider a relationship that ended or a difficult period in a relationship and write a goodbye to it.

3. Write your own ritual for saying goodbye.

4. Notice how the lack of punctuation and odd syntactical juxtaposition (like “to chop to shake an apology when you cry” —Or “I feel a wet bank in me ring dry here I’ll wrap you) in Dooley’s poem creates ambiguity which adds a sense of texture and nuance to the relationship. Use the poem as a model and try you hand at your own odd juxtapositons.

5. Notice how Dooley makes a clear, direct statement—Goodbye, friend—after the run of confusing lines. Those two words are also surround by the only punctuation in the poem (long with the period at the end). This gives those two words a punch. Consider contrasting ambiguity and clarity in your writing.

6. Dooley uses unique imagery —a crepe sail, combing compassion, etc. Take any image in the poem and use it as your prompt.

7. Write about anything else in the poem or in life that inspires you.