Once I entered a bar
marathon.
Simple rules: a beer
at every bar in town
from the Old Syber's Saloon to Glen's Theatre
Lounge, sixteen bars.

Tall Reilly and I did it as a race
gulping beer and charging down the streets
from country juke box noise to old
man talk, eightball breaks, television
whispers
we reeled neck and neck to the last
bar
but
one
The Golden Eagle

where some students had somehow gotten wind
and cheered our drunkeness as they never had our lectures.
Foolish, I stopped like the hare
and tortise
Reilly
snuck out back by the pool table
and the foosball game,
got to Glen's and won.
I stumbled second to more cheers;

someone brought us drinks, handed me
a guitar
my fingers not hitting chords or voice
the broadside of a note.
Glen grabbed my arm, said: "Reilly's
getting sick in the street there
by the hydrant" and indeed he was,
bent, like someone speaking with a child.
"You drive him home" he said.

It took us forty minutes to find my car, an hour
more to drive him home the long
six blocks.
Oh how I said goodnight to Reilly, left him
slowly sliding down his front
door in a slumping lump!

I told my mother once I did this in a general way,
drank sixteen beers one night in sixteen bars.
"MY GOD" she said, "THINK OF THE CALORIES!"