Fifteen tiny poems, each a single glance, add up to something like a day's walk through a city with the volume turned up. Andrew Hamlin's "Haiku 22" is a string of haiku rather than one, and the numbered title suggests it belongs to a longer series. No plot connects the pieces. A gas man plods, a ladder lies in traffic, a blind man folds laundry, a stranger slaps his own head in time to a phone call. What holds them together is a way of paying attention, and the poem asks what that attention gives and what it misses.
The form is loose but recognisable. The opening stanza is a clean five-seven-five, and many of the others hover close to it. Then the count slips: "Slumped, and slapping" and "Tasting hot rain" are shorter, and some lines run long. There is no rhyme and little end punctuation, so the poems seem to stop rather than close. Sound does the work rhyme would. In "one lone prone ladder," *lone* and *prone* chime like a small drum-hit, and the word "middle" is stacked twice in two lines ("In the middle lane, / in the middle of the lane") so that the stranded ladder feels pinned to the centre of the road. The same word returns, almost secretly, in the rain haiku, where two fat drops land on "my tongue's middle."
Windows and glass run through the sequence. A fly argues with a pane, a cloud crosses "my window," a chandelier blazes "through purple-tinted window," and the last bright image is of taillights "curved in the bus' windshield," which the speaker sees as "frozen red raindrops." The speaker nearly always looks through something, and the glass often improves what is behind it. A traffic jam becomes jewellery. A dull "overcast Tuesday" gets a blaze of colour. Even the first stanza has a screen in it: the speaker is "scribing him through my keyboard," turning a passing stranger into text. The gas man "plods on" regardless. That sets the poem's honest limit, since the people it records keep walking out of the frame. The cloud passes, the fly will not leave, and "everything happens / in the time it takes."
Many of these moments are near misses. "For a split second / I thought she was calling / to say she loves me" is hurt by its own plainness, because the flat second line shows how badly the speaker wanted it. The train stanza says "so nearly sublime" and then simply stops, with no full stop, as though the feeling slipped away mid-sentence. Elsewhere the heart "jumps tempo" at an overheard "Would you like to repeat that?" before settling: "but no, they don't fight." Music keeps surfacing as the thing that organises all this. A ghost is felt "quite strongly this dead-of-night / hearing Bud Powell." The Lester is presumably the saxophonist Lester Young, though the poem never says so. The man on the cell call slaps his head "in rhythm," which makes a private absurdity into percussion. The grin "for each shooting-star–humor" does the same for jokes, which flash and vanish in "the grey season."
The sequence ends on a harder note. "Windstorm splits branches / he rolls over on his side / wedged in his alcove." The "he" has no introduction, and the poem gives him no name or story. Judging by the imagery, he is someone sleeping rough, small and pressed into a corner while the weather breaks things above him. After so many witty glimpses, the closing image reminds us that the speaker's pleasure in watching sits next to someone else's discomfort. It also echoes the opening, where the gas man plods past the writer's desk.
The poem is significant because it takes a form associated with seasons and nature and fills it with keyboards, buses, cell phones and overcast Tuesdays, without losing the haiku's habit of turning one moment into a whole feeling. It also admits that this is a partial art. The poet catches only fragments, "so nearly sublime," and the poem is more truthful for saying so.