Venus and the Ark - spoof

Sexton calls this poem a spoof because she is mocking the story of Noah's Ark.  In Noah's Ark, the people get on the ship to be saved from the flood brought about by wickedness in mankind.  God's intention was not to destroy people, but to destroy wickedness and sin.  In a similar way (but not for the same reasons), the two Ph. D.'s  escaped the purge of Earth, but had no way of continuing the human race, as Noah had.

I found it interesting that the only other people Noah could bring were his family, meaning that to reproduce, they would have to incest.  To mock this, and sort of challenge society's ideas of sexuality, Sexton subtly suggests homosexuality by having the only two people on Venus be male.

Unlike in Noah's Ark, humankind on Venus did not survive.  The two men died off, only to see

 two fish creatures stop

on spangled legs and crawl

from the belly of the sea.

This evolution suggests that there will someday be humans again on Venus.  Although it can be concluded that the new humans will live in a utopia through the positive connotations of fruit when the men "heard the new fruit drop," this is not the case.  The new fruit, acting as a symbol for the new mankind, can rot and spoil.  Thus, Sexton implies that it is inevitable that dystopia will form again.  This relates back to the poem being a spoof, because in Noah's Ark, it was implied that all sin and wickedness were wiped out.