Seventeen tiny scenes, and hardly one of them is pretty in the usual way. A man's sweat darkens his jeans, a pigeon pecks crumbs under an advertisement, a siren howls downtown, and a toothless stranger chews pizza at a bus stop. These are the sort of things most of us look straight through. The poem's central idea is that paying attention is itself a form of generosity. Nothing here is grand, yet the sequence keeps circling the biggest subjects, loneliness, death and the wish to find something beautiful, without ever raising its voice.
The form is a loose, living version of haiku. Each stanza has three short lines, a quick glance at something and a seasonal anchor ("this hottest day of the summer," the Fourth of July). But the syllables aren't counted out strictly. The first stanza runs roughly five, six, five, and later ones drift further. What survives is the haiku's compression and its habit of ending on a small jolt. There is no rhyme, and the rhythm is that of speech. Lines break in awkward, interesting places: "the heel of my right hand / dampens the denim" hangs its verb on the next line, so the sweat seems to spread across the break. In "find, on the short sticker bush / rest for the twilight," the word "rest" arrives last, like the chickadees finally landing.
Sound and voices run through the whole sequence. The fireworks are "thick, rolling booms," a siren becomes "a man's wide-mouthed cry," a steel pipe "sings" its own song, two drunks sing along with Pigpen, and an old man tells every passing young woman she looks pretty. Even the man who "toothlessly chews pizza" is defined by his mouth. The city turns into a chorus of unpolished voices. The Pigpen stanza is the funniest. The singer "he's dead but / keeps up appearances," which suggests a recording that lets a dead man go on performing for drunks.
The poem is also sharp about contrasts. A bus banner promises "8 restaurants to choose from," and below it a pigeon makes do with crumbs. A man sits outside with one bean on his plate, and the stanza ends on the lone word "history," as if he were a leftover from another time (that is my reading, since the poem gives no explanation). The flag at the fire station hangs at half-mast, yet "butterflies / catch the breeze, higher." Grief and lightness sit side by side and neither cancels the other.
The poem's one general statement is "Every day is death, / every day is life; as such, / what more can be said?" Its shrug is telling. Having stated the big idea, the speaker stops and goes back to the evidence. Just as revealing is "I'll fancy the mush / rotting in my black waste can, / the beach at high tide." Imagination here is a choice, and a slightly comic one. The speaker doesn't pretend the rot is anything but rot, but decides to hear the sea in it. This links to the earlier line "I remind myself / not to expect friendship / there, that's better," where the speaker coaches himself through disappointment, perhaps loneliness. The only question in the sequence, "Who watches the light / in the corner, as it clicks / on and off again?", points to the answer. The speaker does, and so, by the end, do we.
The poem is significant because it takes a form often linked with mountains, frogs and moonlight and sets it among bus stops, trash cans and tunnels. Its most haunting stanza, "The whole galaxy, / denied her by one hundred- / odd feet of tunnel," lets the vast and the mundane collide in a single image. It never says who "her" is, and that restraint is typical. The poem doesn't pity its drunks, old men or pigeons, and it doesn't sentimentalize them either. It lets them be funny, strange and alive, and invites us to notice the same things on our own walk home.