Seventeen syllables is not much room for a life, yet Andrew Hamlin's "Haiku 17" keeps squeezing one in, scene after scene. It is a run of small three-line pictures, and what binds them is a speaker who looks hard at the world because something in it hurts. Death hangs at the edges: a man who "dies quietly," someone putting on Brubeck and "waiting to die" while "one whole year passes," a confession that "I've tried all the things." Yet buses, trains, crows and orchids keep breaking in. The central idea seems to be that attention is a way of staying alive, and that grief and ordinary life run side by side instead of taking turns.
The form is loose but not careless. Many stanzas follow the classic pattern of five, seven and five syllables. The opening one is exact: "I place four fingers / to my breast beside my heart / Coltrane touches here." Others stretch it, such as the long second line of the two sleeping old men. The second stanza is the most interesting formal move. Its lines break against the grammar, so that "the" is stranded at a line's end and "kettle on to boil" has to wait for the next line. The syntax waits just as the speaker waits for water to heat. There is no rhyme, and the music is in the sounds inside the lines: "two fat crows on thin branches," "toe-to-toe," the hissing of "storm windows" and "shambles south."
The imagery keeps returning to the body, and especially to hands. Four fingers press a chest, a ring stays on a dead man's hand, a man at the D Line makes a peace sign with "five orchids in hand." Feeling is almost never named. It shows up as a gesture, a snore, a "deep-nosed exhale–sob" that the parade-goers ignore. The one place the poem admits pain outright is "the sting still sits in," and even that is a physical word, as if the hurt were a splinter. The tone can be dry or funny too. The socks that "should last a good while; only / a handful of holes" turn an everyday worry into a quiet joke. Judging by the context, they may also be a gentle measure of how much time is left.
The poem also plays with scale. A kindergarten boy is "waist-high to his mother's hug." A few stanzas later the speaker sees "seven miles / to the north," out to the water and the Naval Station. Small and large, near and far, are all held in the same look. Public transport supplies much of the setting (a bus, a northbound train, the D Line, Convention Place), and the place names suggest a busy city. The speaker moves among strangers who are not quite company, though several offer small grace without knowing it. A boy in a green jacket is "testing his spring against the train / and happy to lose." That is a cheerful defeat, a sharp contrast with the speaker's long fight with the sting. A woman "talking to God / or to something in the sky" is "keeping it civil," a line that is funny and tender at once.
Hope here is never allowed to get too big. "That sunshine glow spreads / as the northbound train pull in… / it's only one light." The ellipsis holds the breath, and then the ordinary explanation lets it out. The real hinge comes soon after: "Like anything else / I eventually stop / but not on this day." It is the plainest statement of mortality in the poem, and the last phrase turns it into a small refusal.
That refusal is what makes the sequence worth reading. It does not console or resolve, and it does not claim that jazz, orchids or a stranger's wave can cure anything. It suggests only that noticing them is enough to get through one more day. The last image fits this well. Two crows sit on thin branches, balanced and watching, and the sequence ends on a view held steady, not on an answer. Like the speaker, the crows have found a way to stay up and keep looking.