In the beginning, our speaker is on his knees just as he was in the poem that opened Night Sky with Exit Wounds, "Threshold." Instead of watching passively, however, here he is an active agent, pleasing either god or a sexual partner as "another man leav / into throat." The man is not coming, as would be conventional language for sex, but rather evacuating and emptying the speaker in the religious valence, the man being spoken of could be god himself as words of prayer fill and leave the speaker's mouth. Prayer and pleasure are somewhat opposite, but also complimentary in that both provide a brief moment of rapture or pleasure intended to fill or tend to an absence or craving. This oscillation back and forth between religious devotion and physical, sexual devotion is mirrored by the poem's seesawing form, in which the gaps left by one line are filled by the next. The poem casts the act of kneeling to perform a sex act as a kind of devotional prayer. In this unity provided by the body and the mouth, the speaker believes he is able to fully engage in the act of living, as well as savor the brief moment that his life provides him on earth: "Only to feel / this fully, this / entire, the way snow / touches bare skin-& is, / suddenly, snow / no longer." Analysis It explores the power of the speaker's mouth, both to pray and beg for mercy, but also to write poetry and perform sex acts. The poem "Devotion" is the thirty-fifth and final poem in Ocean Vuong's Night Sky with Exit Wounds.
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