A late-night car ride becomes a strange mix of tenderness and dread. The speaker is driving, or at least awake, while a woman sleeps with her head in his lap. Everyone else is asleep too. He smokes, the jug of drink is half-empty, and the moon seems to wrap around him as the car "sways / through the Milky Way." Memories of a walk by the sea, with snow on the dunes, flicker in and break off mid-sentence.
The mood shifts sharply in the final lines. Sitting in this quiet intimacy, he thinks of bombs "opening the skin of girls like you asleep." The poem doesn't say which war, so the reference stays open, but the contrast is the point: here is one safe, sleeping girl, and elsewhere others are being destroyed. His advice to "fold your wings over your head" sounds protective and helpless at once. The opening image of kings' bones and the closing "white bones / under the turnpike" make the whole road feel like a graveyard beneath a beautiful sky.