"Goodnight Road" begins with a car starting up and a drive with no real goal. The speaker's senses feel "knifed," dulled and made smaller, as if they are escaping numbness more than heading anywhere. The sky has no stars, yet the place they reach still "held a spark," so the journey is about hope in a dark setting rather than a destination.
The middle stretch turns eerie and strangely gentle. The group hides in close spaces and hears chanting that is somehow "mellifluous," a sweet sound made of familiar names. Even the monsters seem to fall short, because they "had been kind." Fear gets softened here.
Then comes the girl with chips in her face and a draping cloak, crying quietly. The line that she was "a joke" suggests she has been mocked or dismissed. The speaker's group finds her and takes her home, which gives the poem a quiet, compassionate ending. The mood moves from dull and unsettled to dreamlike, then finally warm and protective.