Night’s passage takes me through villages of fish-hung trees.

Night’s passage takes me inside low bridges

 and under sunsets and over lights

across Dixon and Brighton and Joliet

over highways where semitrucks like birds fly away

by streetclubs and stripmalls and watchtowers,

 when time is like a classical music station

that suddenly volume-swells and startles me.

Night’s passage takes me through thoughts

 that crowd my mind like expressway traffic.

Like the traffic, my thoughts are all going places I will never know.

 Night’s passage sweeps the day out of me.

Night’s passage makes me lie flat with my shoes off

and no destination in mind,

 just motion, just motion.

Turn up the stereo—

My life’s a steering wheel

turning harder by the hour.

Press the horn.

If you can’t hurt me,

can you feel me roar?

 I am tired and I am going to sleep

and will sleep the same number of hours

as I’ve slept for my entire life

that seems ten thousand years long

till I go under stars and starwater

and dissolve into death.