Wedding Poem | When After Some Time, Finally, Your Kids are at Their Dad’s

TIMBER 2013

Ross Gay

Ross Gay is the author of three books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His collection of essays,The Book of Delights, was released by Algonquin Books in 2019. 

Wedding Poem

    —for Keith and Jen

Friends I am here to modestly report

seeing in an orchard

in my town

a goldfinch kissing

a sunflower

again and again

dangling upside down

by its tiny claws

steadying itself by snapping open

like an old-timey fan

its wings

again and again,

until, swooning, it tumbled off

and swooped back to the very same perch,

where the sunflower curled its giant

swirling of seeds

around the bird and leaned back

to admire the soft wind

nudging the bird’s plumage,

and friends I could see

the points on the flower’s stately crown

soften and curl inward

as it almost indiscernibly lifted

the food of its body

to the bird’s nuzzling mouth

whose fervor

I could hear from

oh 20 or 30 feet away

and see from the tiny hulls

that sailed from their

good racket,

which good racket, I have to say,

was making me blush,

and rock up on my tippy-toes,

and just barely purse my lips

with what I realize now

was being, simply, glad,

which such love,

if we let it,

makes us feel.

When After Some Time, Finally, Your Kids are at Their Dad’s

is to be sunk in this muck-

fisted tussle this must this mud

this panty-yanking kung-fu

this reptile pre-fuck

of slurps and growls

of grunts and hisses

our eyes gone weird and filmy

our teeth squirming in our gums

the lightning writhing off our backs

and when I put my tongue

through you to read with it

the scrawl crawling your skull’s craggy walls

which is kind of like

sucking your brains out

but more literary

I get scared I’m hurting you and stop

but you say please don’t

and bite a hole in my throat

through which the moon

unbuckling her bonnet of bone

plunges parched

and slurping

into the swamp we’ve made

of our want.

Sharing with the Ants

a euphemism for some

yank and gobble

no doubt some

jungle tumble or other

like monkey-spanking

or hiding the salami

of course your mind

goes there

loosey-goose that you are

me too!       me too!

you have a favorite

don’t lie

I’ve heard you say them

tending the hive

eating the melon

how’s the tunnel traffic

or as a “massage therapist”

would say to my pal

when his loneliness

dragged him to a carpeted room

in an apartment building

in Chinatown

where the small hands

lathered his body

open the door

naturally

sharing with the ants

some entymologic metaphor

the chronic yoke

in  love-making

not only of body to body

but life to death

sharing with the ants

or the specific act of dragging with the tongue

one’s sweat-gilded body from the tibia’s

look-out along the rope bridge

of the Achilles marching

across the long plains of the calf

and the meticulously unnamed zone behind the knee

over the hamstring into

use your imagination for Chrissakes

but I will tell you it is dark there

and sweet

sharing with the ants

but actually that’s not at all

what I’m talking about

I mean actually

sharing with the ants

which I did September 21

a Friday in 2012

when by fluke or whim or

prayer I jostled the crotch-high

fig tree whose few fruit had been

scooped by our fat friends

the squirrels

but found shriveled and purple

into an almost testicular papoose

smuggled beneath the fronds

of a few leaves

one stalwart fruit which

I immediately bit in half

only to find a small platoon of ants

twisting in the meat

and when I spit out my bite

another 4 or 5 lay sacked out

their spindly legs

pedaling slow nothing

one barely looking at me through a half-open eye

the way an infant might

curled into his mother’s breast

and one stumbled dazed through my beard

tickling me as it tumbled

head over feet over head

over feet back into the bite

in my hand the hooked sabers

of their mandibles made soft kneading

the flesh their claws

heavy and slow with fruit

their armor slathered plush

as the seeds shone above

the sounds of their work

like water slapping

a pier at night

and not one to disrupt an orgy

I mostly gobbled around their nuzzle and slurp

careful not to chomp a reveler

and nibbling one last thread of flesh

noticed a dozey ant nibbling the same

toward me its antennae

just caressing my face

its pincers

slowing at my lips both

of our mouths sugared

and shining both of us

twirling beneath the fig’s

seeds spinning like a newly

discovered galaxy

that’s been there forever