A man is invited into a woman's bed, ends up being sick over her feet, and is then consoled by the expanding universe. Anselm Hollo's poem sounds like the setup of a bad joke, but it turns into a quiet argument that a clumsy, embarrassing evening can still count as "pretty good," and that even things drifting apart might be heading home.
The title holds the first pun. "In the Gobi, and Out of It" sets a vast desert beside the slang for being dazed or drunk, and the first two sections act out both meanings. Section I is all breathless anticipation. Its opening sentence tumbles forward without settling: "Being invited to the lady's large bed / delighted!, and overcome by possibilities." The exclamation mark followed by a comma is odd, and it suggests a mind too excited to punctuate properly. The sentence's main verb is wrapped in understatement: the feeling "Was not unlike stumbling through the Gobi Desert, / under an orange moon." The double negative "not unlike" is dry and almost bureaucratic, but the image under it is generous. A huge, strange, beautiful, disorienting space opens up, and the "large" bed quietly becomes a desert itself. Then comes an "ancient city" where he does not understand "a word." Desire here is foreign travel, wonderful and bewildering, with no phrasebook. The speaker is thrilled and out of his depth in the same simile.
Section II drops the lyricism. The lines are short, flat and almost clinical: "Puking over her feet, I complain / she's 'cold'." The quotation marks leave a question open. Is she literally chilly, or is he accusing her of coldness? The poem doesn't say, and the ambiguity adds a little pathos to the farce. The lowercase "it is not / an idyllic scene" follows a full stop with deliberate offhandedness, and the line break after "not" gives a small pause before the understatement. "Idyllic" is a prim, pastoral word dropped into a mess, which is where the comedy lies. Then the speaker assesses himself: "too old, to do any better." The misplaced comma makes him hesitate, as if the admission costs something. The key line follows: "this is, in fact, pretty good." The commas around "in fact" make it sound like a man talking himself into contentment, and also like a man who means it. The poem lets both readings stand.
Section III shifts scale abruptly. "The galaxies receding make a sound:" uses a colon to promise something grand. What arrives is "Patter of dog feet on sidewalk-", a tiny, domestic fragment with no verb that trails off in a dash. The words themselves imitate the sound, with the soft taps of "patter" and "feet." Receding galaxies are a real image of the expanding universe, and they carry a feeling of distance and loneliness that echoes the gap between two people in a bed. But the poem hears them as footsteps. The final line, "Wherever they're going, they're going home," is the one place where the language turns balanced and proverbial. The repeated "going" gives it a steady, walking rhythm. "They" could mean the galaxies, the dogs, or both, and perhaps the lovers too. Home becomes a direction rather than a place.
The poem is in free verse with no rhyme, which keeps it conversational. Sections I and II are full of ragged syntax, fumbling commas and half-finished thoughts. That makes the smoother final cadence feel earned rather than decorative, like a breath let out.
The poem matters because it avoids both bravado and self-pity. A drunken, aging, slightly ridiculous moment is set against the whole cosmos, and neither cancels the other. The universe doesn't make the vomit trivial, and the vomit doesn't make the universe absurd. Comedy becomes a way of telling the truth about desire, age and disappointment, and the consolation at the end comes from a dog on a pavement, not from any grand pronouncement.