A man lurches onto a bus and announces to the driver that he has "drunk her under the table." It is the kind of line you would forget by the next stop. Art Gomez does the opposite. He stops on it and turns it over until the boast looks strange, then sad, then almost holy. In "Ceremony," a throwaway barroom idiom opens onto questions about appetite, loss, and what a bystander is willing to see.
The title does the first piece of work. A ceremony has rules and an audience, and nothing about a stumble onto a bus seems to qualify. Yet the poem keeps handing us ritual vocabulary. The man "proclaims" his boast, as if it were a decree. His "Passions" arrive with a capital letter. The speaker will not "forsake" him, and he ends in a "cruciform stance." By the final lines an ordinary commute has taken on the outline of a rite, and we must decide whether that is mockery, tenderness, or the speaker's own projection. Judging by the closing lines, it is partly the last.
The second stanza is where the poem does its closest thinking. "How does one 'drink' an / other; consume this other?" The line break splits "another" in two, so for a moment the word becomes "an other," a separate person. The quotation marks around "drink" hold the idiom up like a suspicious coin. Taken literally, drinking someone means swallowing them, and appetite starts to shade into communion, or even cannibalism. The table changes too. It may no longer be a bar table but something closer to an altar, and under it "his Passions play." A passion play is the staged drama of suffering, while lower-case passions are desires and griefs. "Play" also suggests children hidden beneath a table, something private and unruly kept below the surface. Everything the man's swagger covers is down there.
There is no rhyme and no steady metre. The poem relies instead on enjambment and shifts of register. The opening is plain anecdote, three short lines and one line of speech. The second stanza turns halting and interrogative, its lines breaking mid-thought ("under which / his Passions play?") as if the speaker's mind keeps stalling. The third begins with a long, composed line that slows the poem down. Meanwhile "other" returns again and again: "an other," "this other," "this one or this other." Repeated this often, it stops being a pronoun and becomes an idea, the stranger we cannot really know. The speaker's admission, "I swear I do not know them," matters here. The sympathy in the poem comes without any acquaintance.
The central image is the man himself, "arms outstretched, / holding bus stanchions across the aisle." Stanchion is a cold, practical word, a metal pole bolted into a vehicle. Set against it, "cruciform" is Latinate and faintly clinical, as though the speaker reaches for the grandest vocabulary available to describe someone he is watching from a distance. Notice that the poem never says he is *like* Christ. The cross is only a shape his body happens to make, and the poem lets him be ridiculous and cross-shaped at once without choosing between them.
That restraint carries into the ending. "I tell myself it is so he will not fall" admits that the speaker is offering himself a comfortable explanation, and the phrase "I tell myself" gives it away. The last line overturns it: "What if it is so he will not rise?" Fall and rise pull in several directions. The words recall resurrection, but they also mean getting up from a seat, getting up from a drunk, getting up to face a morning without "her." Perhaps the outstretched arms are not steadying him but pinning him in place. The poem ends on a question mark, with no answer offered.
What makes "Ceremony" worth reading is that it refuses both contempt and easy pity. The drunk is neither a joke nor a martyr, and the poem finds something ritual in a public bus without pretending to know what it means. Its sharpest move is to turn the scrutiny back on the watcher. The real drama may lie less in the man's posture than in the small, self-soothing story the speaker tells to avoid looking any harder.