"Drive In" never settles on one scene, and that is its method. The title and details give us a night at the movies: a hamburger and shake, an usher calling intermission, stars' names rolling across the screen, wrappers on the floor. They arrive the way images do in a film, by cutting rather than explaining. The central idea, as I read it, is that an audience is gradually consumed by what it consumes. The viewer begins by ordering food and ends up melting like food, while the "I" who has been narrating quietly takes charge of the "you" who watches.
The opening stanza sets up the flicker of projected light. "Shapes of times quaver and mutually reflect, / lightening the transcenium." "Transcenium" isn't a standard word. Judging by the sound, it crosses "proscenium," the front of a stage, with a "trans-" prefix, as if the stage has been crossed or exceeded. Then comes the hitchhiker, who "plucks up a number everyone knows" and whose "generator throbs one, two more times." He is part person, part machine, and the poem calls him "a perfect replication of the primal source, / more potent and triangular than the campus / that betrayed him and on which he was based." A copy outshines its original, and "based" is the language of adaptation, of films drawn from something else. The idea returns later when the neighbor's muscles are "hard as Platonic forms." In Plato, ideal forms are the real thing and physical objects are shadows of them. Here the screen body is the ideal and living flesh the pale imitation, and a cinema is, after all, a dark room where shadows are watched.
The tone is deadpan and the humor sly. The speaker tries "to indulge every passion, even that, / half-guilty and overwhelming, for a fat / hamburger," so appetite and shame sit side by side. The poem is also quick to turn menacing. "Outside water is cheap and uninspiring / until some fascist pokes your head in it / and won't let go." The flat adjectives build a bland expectation, and the violence arrives without warning. It's unclear whether this happens on screen or outside, and the poem seems to enjoy withholding that answer.
The third stanza turns to the Western. "Gunfighters pass like little girls around the corner / to buy ice cream" is a simile that merges menace and innocence. The pharmacist with "magnificent lenses," himself a watcher, gets lost in the street while the gunfighters "irresponsibly destroy his front windows." His "cerebellum is unravelled in the children's hands," a cartoon violence with no blood. Then the stanza swerves: "my belt buckle comes undone again." That "again" implies a habit, and the line puts violence and desire together as two things the evening serves up for consumption.
The last stanza is where the self comes apart. The viewer, "electrified" by the music, is blended into "a semi-sour cream, tenderly melting / into the cushion and trickling among the wrappers." The most striking phrase is "you've become a thing of gerunds finally." Gerunds are verbs dressed up as nouns, so a "thing of gerunds" is a person made of watching, dreaming and melting, a pure ongoing process with no fixed core. Even the "horoscope looks on impassively," as if fate were just another spectator. Then comes the takeover: "I have taken over. But never ask, / whatever it is you were just about to ask." The poem ends by cutting off the question, like a film that keeps running whether or not you're ready.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no steady meter. Its long, conversational lines are built from grammatically tidy sentences whose meaning jumps like dream logic. The pronouns keep shifting between "he," "I" and "you," so the reader can't keep a fixed seat. Sound does some quiet work, as in the clustered consonants of "quaver" and "minuscule" and the echoing "ask... ask" at the close, but the pleasure comes mostly from surprising word choices like "wade up the lights" and "breath is filming in front of you." That last phrase puns on a film of condensation and on filming itself.
Its significance lies in how well it captures absorption. Instead of describing what it feels like to be swallowed by entertainment, it makes the reader experience it: scenes change without warning, the "you" is addressed and then overridden, and the logic slides away. For anyone who has lost an evening to a screen, the poem is funny and a little unsettling.