Glimpsing Nietsche through Rilke
was like glimpsing naked bodies writhing
between the zigzag gray of late night TV.
My eyes have always pondered
a moment longer than is casual.

Tonight Taylor and I are walking, buzzed,
under a bridge in Tucson, Arizona.
He nudges a guy in corduroy, and buys two cigarettes
a dollar apiece. He knows I don’t smoke.
We pass it between us. The bars are so close together.
We can walk everywhere and anywhere.
We walk to his car.

The night is wide, but shallow,
a stroke of French Ultramarine on primed canvas.
The radio leaks, smoke spills from my nostrils.
-Keep it out of the car.

I stick my head out of the car and rotate my vision
from asphalt to star-stricken sky,
faster, faster.

In between the blue and the black are Budweiser lights
and parking signs, smoke dust, radio waves,
and Taylor, chuckling.

We’re in the Milky Way, streaks between streaks,
lines between lines. We’re parked between the lines.
No one can say we’re doing wrong.
But my eyes always ponder longer than is casual.
The night zags onward.The car stands still.