At the Gym

The “salt-stain spot” (Line 1) that occasions “At the Gym” carries a heavy symbolic load. As a sweat stain, it stands as a conventional symbol for the effort and exertion that the weightlifters demonstrate in their exercise. By the end of the poem, the sweat stain becomes the “halo” (Line 33), denoting the holiness of the poem’s weightlifting community.

The sweat stain’s role in the poem is one of a synecdoche for the gym and the weightlifting community as a whole. A synecdoche is a literary device that substitutes the whole of something with one of its parts. In this case, the sweat stain is a product of the weightlifting community’s exercises and the ritual use of the bench, and it comes to contain and represent all of those things within the poem. The speaker makes these connections most significantly when he calls the stain “collectively, / [as a] sign of where we’ve been” (Lines 10-11). This quote suggests, too, that the stain stands for the larger lives of those members of the community “where [they’ve] been,” even outside of their time at the gym.

The sweat stain also resonates with the poem’s larger celebration of life, particularly at the end of the work, when the speaker calls it “some halo / the living made together” (Line 33-34).