"Learning to Speak" displays Gay's tendency to treat the intersections between life and death both as daily occurrences and as poignant occasions of pathos:
you know we are at every turn - laundromat, subway,
courtroom, ball game - shoulder to shoulder
face to face with someone who didn't
shoot the dog or burn the kid,
who didn't fist his rage across someone's face -
at every turn we are in the midst of these small
lanterns lighting a road away
Gay's poems are "small lanterns" of "lighting" and more.
Gay's prose poems are impressive. According to Charles Simic, the prose poem "is the result of two contradictory impulses, prose and poetry, and therefore cannot exist, but it does." Simic's formulation is useful in engaging the complicated currents that run through Gay's work. Eight prose poems are titled "The Syndromes." As the title indicates, all are written in the nomenclature of doctors and diagnosis, medical definition. Some include: Cartographer's Syndrome, Undertaker's Syndrome, and one is called "Raining or Washing." Perhaps the most revealing of the series is "The Syndromes: Doubling":
. . . the layered and concurrent seeing of two discrete versions of a given object or person: the man's briefcase is also an intricately woven shawl of bones; the sleeping child's face is also crawling with ants; a flagpole is also a gallows. In the most acute presentation, one's hands are also one's hands.
Through direct engagement of contradictory impulses he examines culture, himself, and even his own poetic materials. Of course it's satisfying how familiar objects such as a man's briefcase or a flagpole can give way to the unexpected, but Gay does not stop there.
