Fifteen small scenes make up "Haiku 28": a dead beggar, a car horn, a crow at a fruit tree, a cat wearing a possum. The numbered title suggests one link in a longer chain, but this sequence also works as a whole, and its last stanza explains why. The speaker admits to "stalking" an "unwritten haiku" through downtown, and the sun comes out. The joke is that the fourteen poems before it are the hunt's catch. The central idea is that poetry lives in whatever is in front of you, and that for this speaker, what is in front of you is always shadowed by endings.
The form is disciplined but relaxed. Nearly every stanza fits the classic 5-7-5 pattern, and there is no rhyme at all, so the music comes from sound inside the lines. The most striking break is in the "Cherry blossom storm" stanza, which closes on a three-syllable line, "stalled green truck." The line is short and stops dead, just like the vehicle. Elsewhere the rhythm acts out its subject. "Shave and a haircut, six bits" borrows a familiar jingle, and "staccato, then out" cuts off right after it, the way a horn blast would. In "Regular waves in / successive spikes," the repeated *s* sounds and the clipped "spikes" mimic a thin line of water jittering toward "the drain."
That drain connects to a pattern that runs through the sequence, the idea of things going out. The light at the old workplace "goes out, the very instant" the night bus passes. The horn is "staccato, then out." The sprinter's stadium is "drained, still." By the final stanza the sun "came out," and the repeated word turns from loss to relief. Words of emptying and ending (*died*, *fallen*, *dead*, *drained*, *out*) keep returning, so a reader begins to feel death as a steady background hum, not a single event. The first stanza sets the pattern. The beggar's death is not mourned with a speech. It becomes "a reminder / to cherish mint leaves," and that small, odd, sensory object stands in for everything worth savoring.
The sequence stays out of gloom partly through humor and animals. The speaker wonders whether the "dust mites / exhaling under my bed" have "enough space," which treats the tiniest lives with mock-serious concern. The black rooster, "beak high," is imagined adoring the maple he stands beside. The cat riding a man's back, with a "humped dead possum for a hat," is "making friends downtown." That image is both gross and funny, and it puts death and play in one frame. The baby-like whine of the bus, "out of breath," is another small tenderness. Because these comic moments sit among the grim ones, neither tone takes over.
The tenth stanza says the sequence's thought outright: "I remember how / death is life, but it's that 'death' / heavy in this night." The quotation marks around "death" show the speaker holding the word at arm's length, because the comforting idea and the real weight do not match. Just before it, gutter runoff spills "beachward / to salty mother," a image of ending in the sea as a return to a source. The philosophy is in the poem, but the poem admits that philosophy does not always lighten the mood.
What makes the piece worth reading is how it stretches the haiku habit of noticing without losing its core. The scenes are urban (buses, gutters, trucks) rather than pastoral, the speaker says "I" and "my," and the jokes lean toward senryu, haiku's more human and humorous cousin. By the end, the speaker's frustration, "I have stalked you through downtown…", reads as a gentle trick. The haiku he thought he was missing was never absent. It was in the dust mites, the crow, the pink blossoms circling a stalled truck. The poem suggests that paying attention is itself the act of writing, and that the attention matters more because everything, from a beggar to a streetlight, is on its way out.