Three in the morning, a car full of sleepers, a road that won't end: John Oliver Simon fits a surprising amount into a poem that takes under a minute to read. The title supplies the route, Provincetown to New York by the Connecticut Turnpike, and the hour. After that the poem slips loose from the map. By the end, a lover's head in the speaker's lap has been set beside the thought of bombs falling on other sleeping girls, and the ordinary highway has turned into a graveyard.
That collision is the central idea: private tenderness can't be sealed off from violence happening somewhere else at the same moment. The hinge is "at this moment," where the drifting reverie suddenly asks "how to tell." There is no question mark, as if the problem were too real for one. How do you say this to someone asleep beside you, or put it into a poem?
The poem opens on a strange, confident assertion: "old moon rising in Leo / the bones of ten thousand kings / litter the highway." Leo is the lion, the royal sign, so the astrology quietly produces the kings. The verb "litter" does the rest. Kings become rubbish at the roadside, and power ends as debris. Nothing explains the image. It arrives with the logic of a half-dream, which suits the hour.
The form supports this. The poem is free verse with no rhyme, no capital letters at the start of lines or sentences, and hardly any punctuation beyond a few full stops and one dangling dash. It reads like thought at 3 a.m., loose and unedited. The line breaks do careful work, though. "Your head now in my / lap" stops on "my," so the closeness arrives a beat late. "Bombs are / opening the skin" leaves the bombs hanging before a verb that sounds almost gentle, like a flower or a door. The horror is all the greater for being understated. Instead of rhyme there is a hush of recurring o-sounds (old, bones, snow, soaked), which gives the poem a hollow, nighttime quality.
The images move quickly between memory and present. The walk by the sea is three cold, clear things, "sand, green water, snow / on the dunes," and then a remark cut off mid-thought: "what's the use of-". The dash leaves the reader to supply the ending, and the bombs later seem to answer it. Then the car "sways / through the Milky Way," and the turnpike merges with the sky. Next comes the oddest moment: "I'm lying soaked on the earth / with the moon / around me, tickling / my fingers, circle within circle." The speaker has moved from the car to the ground. Judging by the imagery, this could be the dunes remembered, or the half-empty jug taking effect, or the moon's reflection rippling in water. The poem doesn't choose, and the effect is of a mind loosening. "Tickling" is a notable word here, playful and almost childlike. It makes the moon something small and affectionate, a long way from the cold royal debris of the opening.
The ending turns that affection into something helpless. "So long to ride" can mean a long journey, and it may also echo a farewell. "You better fold your wings over / your head" gives the sleeper wings, making her a bird or an angel, and the advice is what you'd say to a child or to someone bracing for a blast: cover your head. It is tender, and it is all the speaker can offer. Then the final image, "white bones / under the turnpike," loops back to the kings. Kings and girls end up the same, bare and white, with the road running over both. The poem never says whose bones these are, and that uncertainty is the point.
The poem matters because it refuses to preach. It never names a war, a country, or a cause, so the bombs belong to no single conflict. What remains is the position of someone comfortable and awake, with a lover, a car, and a jug of drink, who knows what is happening elsewhere and can't find the words. That honest helplessness gives the poem its force.