Twelve small snapshots of city life add up to a quiet argument about impermanence. Andrew Hamlin's "Haiku 21" has no plot, but it has a direction. It starts with outward glances, such as coins, commuters and a bus tunnel. Gradually it turns inward, until the speaker is left holding only "one piece of skin / and dust on my floor."
The form is the first thing to notice. Each unit is a tercet, and most follow the traditional 5-7-5 syllable pattern closely. "Rain drips down the ledge / my friend sleeps in the back room / two hours to sundown" fits it neatly. The poem also lets the pattern slip at telling moments. "…cold nights, decay" has only four syllables, as though the line itself were cooling and shrinking. The final haiku ends on the six-syllable "victory!… Well, big whoop," whose offhand slang breaks the formal spell. There is no rhyme anywhere. The poem relies on image, juxtaposition and the pause at each line break, with ellipses and dashes adding hesitations of their own.
Haiku traditionally pay attention to nature and the seasons, and Hamlin keeps that habit while moving it to the street. His weather is rain, summer heat and autumn twilight. His creatures are "varispeed snails," his name for SUVs crawling through the morning commute. The coinage borrows a word from audio equipment, and it catches the way traffic lurches between fast and slow. In another poem, four green lights "hang back / in a hunched pack; gang-bangers / awaiting their strike." Judging by the imagery, the lights are being read as a gang, so ordinary urban glare becomes menace. The poem is just as sharp about colour, with the chardonnay, the green lights, the white roses and "the blue of train 16" appearing like flashes across a window.
The central theme is the fight against decay, and it builds across the middle poems. A woman keeps white roses "refrigerated," which is a comic and slightly sad way to hold off death. Next, someone onstage sings "All beauty must die," and the speaker asks, "dare I disagree?" The refrigerated roses seem to be his answer, or at least his evidence that people try. Then summer itself "tries hard / not to die," with its "blazing daytime" undercut by "cold nights, decay." Even the stones carry the theme. In one poem the speaker bets on which stone a raindrop will strike, "and lose yet again." Later, "uncollected stones / reaffirm optimism." The same hard objects are first a game the speaker can't win and then a source of stubborn hope. The poem holds both attitudes without settling on either.
The strongest effect comes from a pair of echoes. The first haiku has a man "clutching chardonnay," and the grammar is slippery enough that it is unclear who holds the glass. The man might, or the sun might, if the line is read loosely. The last haiku returns to the verb: "I clutch at the air / my clawed fingers signify / victory!" The speaker's hands are empty, but he calls the gesture a triumph, then immediately deflates himself with "Well, big whoop." That self-mockery is what stops the poem from sliding into gloom. The speaker can see how absurd it is to grasp at nothing, and he is honest enough to say so. He has already admitted that his possessions amount to skin and dust. The joke softens the despair without denying it.
The poem is significant because it shows how flexible a tiny form can be. A single haiku can only hold a flicker, but twelve placed in sequence start to act on one another. The refrigerated roses, the lost bets and the dying summer all become parts of one mood. The number in the title suggests the sequence belongs to a larger run, though the poem can be read perfectly well alone. What stays with a reader is its tone, which is wry and alert and a little defeated. It treats a bus commute and the end of beauty as equally worth noticing, and it does not claim to have an answer.