A man sits in a bar and cannot quite say where he is. Martin Segal's untitled poem opens with a question that has no easy answer, "Here I have come / to where?", and the reply is a small joke at the city's expense: "A bar in the middle of nowhere, New York City." Nowhere is normally the opposite of New York, but the speaker means it. The sounds carry the idea. "Here," "where" and "nowhere" chime together at the start, and the imagined "there" of Mexico later answers them. The whole poem travels from one of these words to another without the speaker leaving his seat.
One flat sentence makes the trip possible: "But it's Spanish and that's good." He doesn't explain. The language of the bar is enough to carry him to "a lost town / on the west coast of vanquished Mexico." The picture is thin: no beaches, no heat, no faces, only "lost," "west coast," "vanquished." Judging by the imagery, the place matters less as a place than as a state of mind. Most people daydream about triumphant places, but he is drawn to one that has already lost, where nothing is left to prove and nobody is likely to ask for anything. That makes "vanquished" the most revealing word in the poem.
The poem also contrasts two kinds of language. Real life is described in office-like abstractions: "obligations," "responsibility," "internalized," "the solely expected." The fantasy gets the few concrete details there are. The poem's best phrase sits between them: "the automatic easy emptyness / of the solved day." A solved day is like a finished worksheet, with every answer filled in and nothing left to discover. Emptiness, then, is not what he is escaping into. It is what he is escaping from, the hollowness of a life that runs on rails. In the imagined town that emptiness is "gone," along with "the hard binds of responsibility," and "tomorrow is clutter not heeded," a pile of junk in the corner that he can walk past.
The least comfortable line is "A womans alcoholic joy / is used there." "Used" is ambiguous. It could mean enjoyed, spent or exploited, and the line is neither warm nor clearly critical. It may be a glimpse of the fantasy's darker edge, since an escape like this consumes things, including other people's pleasure. That reading is an inference, but the word's coldness makes it hard to ignore.
Then the poem turns on itself: "This bar is my escape / I would not call it otherwise-- I know." The dash is a small stumble, the speaker cutting off an excuse before he can make it. "Know" then rhymes with "grow" in the next line, the poem's one clear rhyme, and it links self-knowledge to the thing he is tired of: "the unrelenting demands to grow." Growth here is a demand, not a desire. The phrase "after twenty six years" suggests the speaker's own age, so the pressure has been "internalized" and has become his own inner voice. A "backdrop of the solely expected" is theatrical language, as if his life were a set painted by someone else.
The form suits this tired honesty. The poem is free verse with no regular meter, and the short lines read like speech, with stops for questions: "to where?" "And why?" The last section stretches into one long, abstract sentence and then drops into the plain "requires relief / and so I'm here." This echoes the opening "Here I have come," so the poem ends where it began. Nothing is resolved. He is still in the bar, and the anticlimax feels truthful.
Its significance lies in that refusal to dress things up. The poem neither celebrates the escape nor condemns it, and it admits that wanting to vanish for an evening is ordinary. For readers of school age, who know something about expectations, its rough edges, such as the missing apostrophe in "womans" and the double hyphen, suit a voice that is not trying to sound polished.