Fifteen tiny snapshots arrive one after another, and none comes with an explanation. The number in "Haiku 19" hints that Andrew Hamlin's piece belongs to a longer numbered run, but what we have is this cluster, which reads like the notebook of someone with a good window seat on the world: a woman in a flowered dress, a fly at a screen, a pickup with its signal blinking. What links the scenes is less a story than a habit of attention. Underneath that attention runs a quiet sense that everything is being worn away.
Time is the real subject, even when it seems to be a sleeping woman. She is ninety-one, and the speaker wonders how many naps in sunlight she has already taken, which turns an ordinary doze into a ledger of a whole life. The floor is "worn away / into grimacing profiles, / into continents," so that countless footsteps have become faces and then maps, and erosion turns into accidental art. The terns heading southeast prompt the sharpest worry: "what if it's the last time / I behold such?" The calendar keeps nudging us along, with "last week of July," "at long last," and "nightfall." Even the Pan Am bag carries this feeling, since it is a souvenir of an airline that stopped flying decades ago.
The form supports the mood. Each stanza is three lines, and by my count nearly all of them follow the traditional 5-7-5 syllable pattern, with the tern stanza running a syllable short. There is no rhyme. Instead the poem relies on line breaks that land on small, unsteady words: "how / many other naps," "some / armor sans a knight," "how we've / mislaid memory." Each sentence hangs for a beat before the next line lets it drop, like a foot not yet set down. The sound is often just as careful. "Raindrop to pavement / softer, just a touch, than one / footstep in the night" is a comparison built to be hushed, and it makes us listen for something almost silent.
The images are small, urban and often funny. The parked Ford F-150 is "armor sans a knight," and the French "sans" gives a mock-chivalric tone to an empty truck. A gull on a thermal is mistaken for "stolen gossamer," so a heavy bird briefly becomes a thread of spider silk, and "stolen" suggests the wind has carried it off. Two crows share a stanza: "one without a bite of bread / follows the one with." It is a miniature of need and luck, offered with no moral. Then there is the "immense stone hand" holding "a son and father" in its palm. It is presumably a sculpture, and it is the one stanza about family. Its weight sits oddly beside the featherlight gull and raindrop around it. The opening scene is also blunt. The poem names a man only as "the Black Muslim" and gives no comment on him. The speaker records and does not explain, which keeps the poem from becoming tidy nature-writing.
Only a few stanzas use "I": the terns, the bus stop, the long drink of air through a window. Elsewhere the speaker is simply a watcher, craning his neck from a ledge or looking out at a train. That posture of waiting and looking gives the sequence its shape. Only at the end does the poem step back and say something general. "Wind doesn't whisper / it reminds us of how we've / mislaid memory." It rejects the cliché of the whispering wind. It also moves to "we" and makes its single plain statement after fourteen scenes of showing. "Mislaid" is a gentle word, as if memory were a set of keys that might turn up again. We might read the poem itself as the search for them.
Its significance lies in how it carries an old, compressed form into a modern American street. It keeps the discipline of brevity and of placing two images side by side, but swaps temple bells for buses and trucks. It gives the unremarkable, such as an old woman's nap, a worn floor and a hungry crow, the dignity of close looking. Its argument is that if we pay attention, the passing moment is also a small loss, and that noticing is how we resist it.