Death

Gay not only characterizes death as a vulture and a skeleton in the mirror, but he also portrays it as a place. The opening line of the poem reads, "No matter the pull toward brink," which refers to the desire to end one's life. A brink is an extreme edge of land before a steep or vertical slope and also a point at which something (typically unwelcome) is about to happen. Since Gay wrote this poem in conversation with Gwendolyn Brooks's "To the Young Who Want to Die," the "pull toward brink" describes suicidal ideation.

Earth

The speaker widens the scope of his praise to the fact that there are "something like two / million naturally occurring sweet things" "on this planet alone" (13 and 12). The lack of certainty over the exact number increases the speaker's delight because it highlights how much beauty there is to discover and celebrate. Nature...