Think of these fourteen haiku as a notebook kept while walking and riding buses through a city. Many place names point to Seattle, such as Green Lake Way and Campus Parkway, though the poems never explain themselves. Each one catches a passing detail: a heart-shaped slice of pear on a bus stop line, a crane casting no shadow, a girl with a small umbrella on her shoulder. The speaker watches closely and rarely draws a neat conclusion.
The tone swings between wry humor and quiet gloom. He jokes about filling out a medical form "in some fashion," and mocks the idea of a lesson after a car kills an old, crippled man ("Lesson…?"). He also calls tedium and fatigue "gifts from fate I must treasure," which sounds half sarcastic, half resigned. Yet the last poem turns gentle, with the moon setting over the lake in pale white and blue. The overall mood is wistful, observant, and a little deadpan, finding small beauty in ordinary, slightly shabby moments.