Memory in this poem works the way it does after a few drinks: blurred at the edges, a little exaggerated, and unexpectedly tender. The speaker looks back at a time with a friend, addressed only as "you." They drive west through bitter cold, the friend plays the gunman and menaces shopgirls, and the two of them are "asshole buddies / anticipating a life to come." The central idea is that this rough, swaggering youth, seen from a distance, turns out to be sweet. The numeral in the title suggests one entry in a longer series, and drunkenness here seems to be less a subject than a state of mind, a haze that loosens both memory and tongue.
The opening has the loose rhythm of a story told at a bar. "Earlier in America" is an odd, slightly formal way to begin, as if the country were a past era. Then the syntax stumbles: "we drove west / the far west." The speaker corrects himself without a comma, the way people do when talking. The detail that "the car's tires / stuck to the road" is clearly tall-tale exaggeration, but it also gives the pair an image of being held in place while still pushing toward the west, the direction of American promise.
The portrait of the friend is the poem's most vivid stretch. "As a gunman" suggests a role being played, and the poem never mentions a gun, so the menace seems theatrical (an inference, but the text invites it). The description that follows drops verbs and stacks images like snapshots: "your rat-sleek hair / your flashing glasses / small, dirty teeth." None of this is flattering, yet the line break delivers the twist: "the girls adored." The enjambment lets "adored" attach to the teeth, to the whole list, or to the friend himself. The speaker doesn't explain why the girls fall for this scruffy figure, and that gap is part of the charm.
Then the gaze shifts. The friend "liked the way / they walked with arms folded / in the cold going for coffee." The shopgirls stop being targets of a game and become people, noticed in an ordinary gesture. Arms folded against the cold, a walk for coffee: it is the quietest moment in the poem and perhaps the truest. Cold has been a problem for the car, and now it becomes a human condition the girls bear with small dignity. A reader may feel some unease that "menaced" and "adored" sit so comfortably together. The poem doesn't excuse the behaviour or condemn it, and that refusal to tidy things up makes it feel honest rather than nostalgic in a cheap way.
The ending pulls the time frames together. "Anticipating a life to come" has dramatic irony, because the speaker is already in that future, looking back at two young men who couldn't know what it would hold. The crude phrase "asshole buddies" works as a term of affection, roughness standing in for intimacy. Then comes the last line, two words and a full stop: "Sweet life." It could be what the young men said, or the older speaker's verdict, and it could be sincere, ironic, or wistful. The poem doesn't choose, and the line is stronger for it.
The sound is subtle. There is no rhyme and the lines are short, mostly three to five syllables, so the poem moves in quick, speech-like bursts. Long *o* sounds run through it ("cold," "drove," "road," "folded," "going"), a low drone like an engine or a slur. Full stops fall only after "road," "adored," and "come," each closing off a small movement and leaving the rest to flow without punctuation. "Cold" frames the poem at both ends, which makes the final "Sweet" land like warmth.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into so little space: a road trip, a friendship, a flicker of danger, a moment of gentleness, and the ache of hindsight. It shows how memory can turn something scruffy and slightly shameful into something close to love, and it does so without sentimentality, trusting plain words and a few sharp images.