"Haiku 16" doesn't behave like a single haiku. It is a string of fourteen three-line scraps, closer to a page from a notebook kept by someone walking through a city with their eyes open. Andrew Hamlin doesn't hold to the 5-7-5 count that many English-language haiku follow. "About that fellow taking" runs to six syllables, and rhyme is absent. What he keeps is the haiku habit of a quick glimpse, a pause, and a small turn, often into humour or unease.
The poem begins by arguing with itself. "I can't write haiku / about that fellow," the speaker says, which is of course a haiku about not writing one. The next stanza flips it: "I could write haiku / about the suspense thrumming / as I breathe deeply." Then comes deflation: "only of the two donuts / awaiting me, soon…" The ellipsis trails off in anticipation. Judging by the nurse and the deep breathing, a medical appointment may lie behind this, though the poem never says so. Either way, the sequence sets the tone. Lofty feeling keeps losing to appetite, and the speaker is honest about it.
Most of the poem is about other people, and here it becomes more serious. A nurse guides a lost man over the phone, and the speaker adds, "and have not we all?" It is the one moment of broad generalisation, and it works because it is half a joke. Soon after comes what reads like the poem's rule of conduct: "One mustn't assume / sadness, from the downturned face / or the pleading hands." The bus stanza then shows the speaker failing it. A passenger has a question but also "a Mohawk / too; so, no answer." That "so" is a small confession of prejudice, delivered without excuses.
The final stanza tests the rule again. "The bum's sundered face / telephone in hand; sad news" does assume sadness, and the word "bum" is blunt. Yet "sundered" is a strong, almost tragic word for a face, and the last action, "he crimps a new smoke," gives the man a small, private routine of his own. The poem ends on a gesture instead of a moral. Notice too how this stanza echoes the earlier phone call. One man is helped through his, and the other holds his alone.
Between these people come sharp images, often built from verbs. Stalks "poke up / struggling past the edges of / two small stiff green boots," and the clustered s and st sounds feel like the stiffness they describe. Blue blossoms "etch the alleyway," as if the colour were being drawn with a fine tool. A gardener's rake "pulls the still-moist leaves," and the impatience is in the verb. "Sunshine and splatter" packs two kinds of weather into one phrase. The oddest line is "The sound of a smile / yes, it's a little bit like / soup spooned from the bowl." Hearing a smile mixes the senses, and the soup makes it warm and domestic.
The punctuation is loose in a way that suits the content. Full stops go missing, a colon appears after "Front yard," and the comma in "A question, he has," bends the sentence slightly out of shape. Line breaks sometimes hold back the payoff. In "I had to hear them / squabbling over violence, to / appreciate peace," the stray "to" at the line's end delays the point, much as the speaker puts off the lesson. The effect is of thought arriving in real time, before it has been tidied.
The poem's significance lies in this looseness. It stretches a compressed form to hold awkwardness, comedy and a conscience. It also suggests that noticing is not the same as knowing. The speaker sees a downturned face, a pleading hand, a Mohawk, and keeps checking what he thinks he has seen. The strict count of syllables matters less here than that habit of attention, which is the part of haiku worth keeping.