Eight three-line scenes, and none of them hurries to tell you what to think. Andrew Hamlin's untitled sequence, headed only by three asterisks, reads like a day of glances: a street, a church door, a bedroom, a shower, a window, a bookshelf, a kitchen. What links them is a temperament rather than a plot. The speaker notices everything, flinches at some of it, laughs at the rest, and finally wonders whether his own life measures up.
The form is the first clue and the first joke. Most stanzas follow the haiku count of five, seven and five syllables, and "Three thin monks, southbound / pass a street hawker sporting / that same shade of orange" fits it almost perfectly. But Hamlin lets the count slip when the feeling demands it. "The madwoman!" has only four syllables, a startled gasp where the pattern expects a fifth. In the seventh stanza the poem turns to look at itself: "Fifty Shades of Grey" is five syllables long, so it "scans well enough for haiku… / some lousy porn, though." A form traditionally tied to nature and stillness is used to be flippant about a famous erotic novel, and the aside quietly admits that counting syllables is easy and meaning is harder. These poems sit closer to senryu, haiku's cousin, which is more interested in human foolishness than in seasons.
There is no rhyme, and the sound is closer to muttering than singing. Commas, semicolons, an exclamation mark and a leading ellipsis make the rhythm stop and swerve like thought. "…well, except for that clogged drain" is a mind drifting from a slogan to plumbing mid-sentence. The nearest thing to a rhyme is visual. The monks' robes and the hawker's clothes share "that same shade of orange," so the sacred and the commercial are linked by colour, and the speaker declines to say which is which.
The imagery is mostly bodily and slightly absurd. The old man who "does not move over" has "thumbnails, talons," and in two words he turns from a stubborn pedestrian into a bird of prey. The speaker's own body appears as "heat on my left foot, / toes crimped against the dresser," a small comfort that earns the verdict "enough for tonight." Contentment here is measured in toes.
Underneath the humour run questions about faith and presence. The monks pass by, apparently serene. A woman kneels and sings at a church door at ten at night and asks, "is He still at home?" The capital H shows she means it. The line is funny, because God becomes a neighbour who might have gone out, and moving, because she asks in earnest. The speaker only reports it and offers no answer. Next comes the self-help slogan "Live in the moment!", which the drain undercuts. Yet the drain is the moment, so the speaker is living in it whether he likes it or not.
The "madwoman" stanza is the least comfortable. The speaker "shrinks from her yells" and imagines her diving from her window. That is fear, a snap label, and a mind that leaps to the worst. The poem might have left it out, and including it makes the speaker more believable.
The sequence also shrinks in scale. It begins with monks and a busy street, passes through a doorway, a foot, a drain and a window, and ends in the kitchen: "My accomplishments / on the scale of one soup bowl, / don't amount to much." The soup bowl is a brilliant unit of measurement, homely, concrete and a little sad. It also contradicts the self-judgment, because the poems have spent eight stanzas noticing a hawker, an old man's nails, a woman's question and a warm foot, and that attention is an accomplishment of its own.
The sequence matters because of what a tiny form can hold. In about a hundred words there is comedy, spiritual longing, self-mockery and a failure of kindness, with no moral to tie them up. It suggests that a life is mostly made of such fragments, and that writing them down honestly counts for something.