Eighteen three-line snapshots make up this sequence, and together they read like a day, or a season, spent paying attention. A plane crosses the sky, a van chitters by, the upper sky goes purple through the blinds, a truck downshifts, and the speaker notices all of it. What holds the fragments together is a mind that keeps swinging between the very large and the very small. The first stanza stares at concrete, gravel and rebar "against the dead stars." Soon after comes "exactly one ant," cultivated in an empty ice-cream pint. The central idea seems to be that attention is a way of living in a world that is always being built, demolished and outlasted. Cosmic time and dinosaur time make everything look temporary, yet a warm patch of sun, a soothing song or a blossom is enough to get through the day.
The form is quietly disciplined. Most stanzas follow the five-seven-five syllable count of traditional haiku, and the opening lines run on that pattern almost perfectly. Some stanzas loosen it, such as "Five ones, he wants" and the queue stanza, whose lines swell and shrink. The poem breaks its own rules just as the speaker's day breaks off. There is no end rhyme, so the music comes from sound within the lines. "Chittering" and "chuffle" are onomatopoeic, and they make the van and the air brakes audible. "Canned soul singer, / Dixieland street trumpet" stacks up hard consonants and then lets the sounds "join downtown midair," as if the city's noises were mixing in the sky. Enjambment adds to the effect. In "who can say what, shall / caper over us?" the comma and line break make the sentence stumble, as if it were prancing too.
Humor keeps the poem from becoming solemn. The speaker "cultivates" an ant like a gardener with a prize crop. A two-hour wait becomes "wrestling Quetzalcoatl," and the poem never explains the reference. It could be a joke, a game or a daydream, and in each case a dull queue is inflated into myth. Even the most wounded line is deflated by logic: "he stole my lover, so he / must know everything." The sarcasm lets us see a sting of jealousy without any self-pity.
Loss runs under the jokes. The "Terry Hall" stanzas are the most concentrated example. The windows have "seen" so much, and the speaker wonders whether they "catch / that tear of the wrecker?" Judging by the next stanza, "Decades of students… / now nothing sits inside save / the grinding machines," the building once held classes and is now being torn down. The ellipsis after "students" leaves a silence where the people used to be. The poem does not explain the building, so we are left with the speaker's own guess that even glass can witness something and mourn. That ties back to the dinosaurs, since we "prance" on top of earlier creatures and something will someday "caper over us."
The sun is the poem's quiet constant. It is ushered out by a plane and a van, and the speaker is "late to the library / on time for the sun" after the clocks change. Later it "dries out my / drowned world, warms my toes," so the speaker can leave the dishes "to insects." The word "drowned" hints at a rougher stretch in the speaker's life, though the poem never says what it was, and the sunlight is allowed to be a small mercy. Anxiety is "pricked" in the brother's birthday stanza and soothed by a Portuguese singer. Relief arrives through sound, warmth or weather, never through an explanation.
The ending is the cleverest move. The cherry blossoms are the classic seasonal image of haiku, and the speaker pities "He who grows bored / of them." That capital H suggests a god, or at least someone who has seen too much. Then the poem cuts itself off with "wait, is that…?" and leaves the thought unfinished. The speaker's attention has jumped to something new, so the sequence ends mid-noticing. That is the poem's value. It does not offer a lesson about time or the city. It shows a person who stays curious and keeps looking, with an ant, a van or a blossom, until the next small thing arrives.