Ross Gay: Poetry Poem Text

Ross Gay: Poetry Poem Text

Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (Excerpt)

Friends, will you bear with me today,

fo I have awakened

from a dream in which a robin

made with its shabby wings a kind of veil

behind which it shimmied and stomped something from the south

of Spain, its breast aflare,

looking me dead in the eye

from the branch that grew into my window,

coochie-cooing my chin,

the bird shuffling its little talons left, then right,

while the leaves bristled

against the plaster wall, two of them drifting

onto my blanket while the bird

opened and closed its wings like a matador

giving upon murder,

jutting its beak, turning a circle,

and flashing, again,

the ruddy bombast of its breast

by which I knew upon waking

it was telling me

in no uncertain terms

to bellow forth the tubas and sousaphones,

the whole rusty brass band of gratitude

not quite dormant in my belly-

it said so in a human voice,

"Bellow forth"-

and who among us could ignore such odd

and precise counsel?

[...]

Love, I'm Done With You (Excerpt)

You ever wake up with your footie PJs warming

your neck like a noose? Ever upchuck

after a home-cooked meal? Or notice

how the blood on the bottom of your feet

just won't seem to go away? Love, it used to be

you could retire your toothbrush for like two or three days and still

I'd push my downy face into your neck. Used to be

I hung on your every word. (Sing! you'd say: and I was a bird.

Freedom! you'd say: and I never really knew what that meant,

but liked the way it rang like a rusty bell.) Used to be. But now

I can tell you your breath stinks and you're full of shit.

[...]

Opera Singer (Excerpt)

Today my heart is so goddamned fat with grief

that I've begun hauling it in a wheelbarrow. No. It's an anvil

dragging from my neck as I swim

through choppy waters swollen with the putrid corpses of hippos,

which means lurking, somewhere below, is the hungry

snout of a croc waiting to spin me into an oblivion

worse than this run-on simile, which means only to say:

I'm sad. And everyone knows what that means.

And in my sadness I'll walk to a café,

and not see light in the trees, nor finger the bills in my pocket

as I pass the boarded houses on the block. No,

I will be slogging through the obscure country of my sadness

[...]

Sorrow Is Not My Name (Excerpt)

No matter the pull toward brink. No

matter the florid, deep sleep awaits.

There is a time for everything. Look,

just this morning a vulture

nodded his red, grizzled head at me,

and I looked at him, admiring

the sickle of his beak.

Then the wind kicked up, and,

after arranging that good suit of feathers

he up and took off.

[...]

The Truth (Excerpt)

Because he was 38, because this

was his second job, because

he had two daughters, because his hands

looked like my father's, because at 7

he would walk to the furniture warehouse,

unload trucks 'til 3 AM, because I

was fourteen and training him, because he made

$3.75 an hour, because he had a wife

[...]

- Ross Gay

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