At the Gym

Mark Doty’s “At the Gym” treats the gym as a place of worship, ritual, and communion. In this way, Doty’s gym serves many of the same functions as a conventional Christian church. Doty makes this connection between gym and church explicit through mirroring religious imagery—most significantly the Shroud of Turin—and functions inside the gym. While typical churches see people celebrate and congregate in the service of divine powers, Doty’s gym celebrates the secular power of the human body. Doty’s speaker also depicts the gym as a homosocial space, which means that it is a space dominated by men. Doty’s men, however, are never individuated, and the speaker describes neither their bodies nor their personalities. Though the men congregate at the gym in shared worship of the body, it is this congregation—the community itself—that trumps each individual’s physical achievement.

Doty’s depiction of the gym as a homosocial place of congregation and shared accomplishment begins and ends with the “salt-stain spot” (Line 1) that occasions the poem. This sweat stain is the poem’s occasion and its object of contemplation. In this way, “At the Gym” shares many similarities with ekphrastic poetry, or poetry that seeks to describe or interpret a work of visual art. While a sweat stain would not traditionally be considered a worthy ekphrastic subject, Doty’s speaker demonstrates the meaning and values such subjects can hold, elevating the poem’s particular sweat stain, by the end of the work, to a “halo / the living made together” (Lines 33-34). As explained in the Symbols and Motifs section of this study guide, the stain represents the weightlifting community that frequents the speaker’s gym.

The relationship between the sweat stain and the gym’s community is first delineated in Lines 2-3, where the speaker states that the stain “marks the place where men / lay down their heads.” This first reference is particularly significant, as the act of “lay[ing] down their heads” resonates both as a prerequisite for weightlifting and for a traditional prostrate prayer position. The one difference is that the weightlifter lays with their “back to the bench” (Line 4). The mental effort of prayer and the physical effort of weightlifting, however, both have the goal of “gaining some power / at least over flesh” (Lines 16-17), particularly in regards to freedom from “desire” (Line 18).

Though the speaker presents prayer and weightlifting as serving similar functions, one important distinction between the two is that prayer aims toward a spiritual resilience that is to be paid off in the afterlife, while weightlifting aims toward physical resilience that is to be enjoyed in bodily life. That is not to say, however, that the weightlifter’s reverence for the body is secular. The speaker’s description of the weightlifters’ “nimbus / of [. . .] intent” (Lines 21-22), where nimbus is understood to be a holy cloud about a god or goddess when on earth, paints them as divine figures on earth. The speaker’s description, therefore, figures the weightlifters as Christ-like figures, fully human and fully divine.

The stain that is the central image of the poem is made possible by the presence of a community whose members are all dedicated to the performance of the same exercises in one place. Their commitment to those exercises inspires them to exert themselves to the point of perspiration. These actions, performed over and over, create a sort of ritual, and those participating chant “Power over beauty, / power over power!” (Lines 26-27) as they lift the weights. The gym, then, is a place of worship. Over time, the simple, repeated acts performed there to celebrate the male body and physical life produces the sweat stain, which the last lines of the poem calls “some halo / the living made together” (Lines 33-34).