Fifteen tercets, and not a single cherry blossom. Where traditional haiku look to the seasons, Andrew Hamlin looks at bus stops, mini-marts, a stranger's pot bags and a lost DVD. Street names like Green Lake Way and Campus Parkway keep the poem in a particular city, though the poem never says more than that. Its central idea is that attention is itself a way of living. The speaker notices small, odd, sometimes sad and sometimes funny things, and tucked among them are fatigue, illness and death.
The form is both kept and loosened. The tercets mostly follow the five-seven-five pattern, though not rigidly: "stains all my gratitude" runs a syllable short of seven. There is no rhyme, and the rhythm is that of speech. "Depends very much, of course" fills a seven-syllable line with the throat-clearing of someone chatting, and the line is funnier for it. The phrase "High above it all" is a cliché about perspective, and the poem punctures it by tying it to a staircase. Line breaks also time the jokes. In "Whoever's not home / presumably wants to buy / his tiny pot bags," the deadpan "presumably" sets up a punchline we don't get until the last two words.
The visual stanzas are the most carefully made. A crane "casts no shadow / swinging, silent, south," and the soft s sounds seem to lower the volume of the whole street. A "heart-shaped slice of pear" sits on the bus stop's yellow line with "no sign of the knife," a tiny mystery that is tender and faintly menacing at once. Another stanza shows a woman standing on the bus with her "shut eyes" as "twinned black lines in soft pencil." It has no final punctuation, so the sentence rolls on "all the way downtown" like the ride. A "parka'd little girl" with a "small Japanese umbrella / on her left shoulder" is pure snapshot. The detail is so exact that we can picture her without being told what to feel.
Under the comedy, the poem keeps returning to mortality, and it does so with a shrug. "If billions manage / their own deaths, then who am I / to gum up the works?" turns death into a machine that runs smoothly because everyone cooperates. Elsewhere an old, crippled man is killed by a car "anyway," and the speaker adds "(Lesson…?)". The parenthesis and trailing ellipsis refuse to supply a moral, even though a haiku is supposed to deliver a flash of insight. The stanza about "Rectal bleeding" works similarly. The quotation marks suggest bureaucratic language, and "I had to fill out their form / in some fashion, eh?" sounds like someone joking to cover worry. The closing "eh?" and the exclamation in "serenity, Ah!" show how often the speaker undercuts a feeling the moment it appears.
Even the stanza on "Tedium, fatigue" calls them "gifts from fate I must treasure / until my last day." The irony is plain, yet it is hard to tell how much of it is sincere. Perhaps ordinary exhaustion really is what a life consists of, and learning to value it is the only wisdom on offer.
The poem's frame tilts toward sincerity. It opens with a petty grievance, a lost DVD that spoils "the sun's return." It ends with the one stanza that has no joke at all: "Gauzy white, cold blue, / the moon sets over Green Lake / six-twenty am." The colors are delicate and the time is logged like a diary entry. After a sequence of mishaps and wisecracks, the speaker is awake at dawn and simply looks. Sun at the start and moon at the end suggest a small circle of days, and the last image is the only one the speaker leaves unspoiled.
The poem matters because it shows that a very old, very short form can hold contemporary city life without turning solemn. Its title, "Haiku 27," suggests one entry in a longer numbered run, which fits a poem that works like a notebook. Taken together, the stanzas build a portrait of a mind through what it chooses to notice. That mind is wry, anxious, observant and never quite able to resist a joke, and it still keeps room for a pale moon over a lake.