Seventeen short verses, and none of them stops to explain itself. "Haiku 38" works like a walk through a city with the eyes open: a sticky bar table, a bus that doesn't hit a cyclist, a crow with an acorn, a moth under a neon sign. The scenes seem unrelated, but they keep returning to one uncomfortable idea. We control far less than we like to think, and what looks like skill or virtue is often just luck. The poem says as much outright: "Gave myself credit / for the light burning upstairs / but that's mostly luck."
The form is stricter than the casual tone suggests. Verse after verse keeps to five, seven and five syllables. The count is seventeen verses, the same number as the syllables in a single haiku, which may be coincidence or a quiet joke. There is no rhyme, so the music comes from consonants. "Seahawks umbrella / shredded in spikes by the storm" hisses and snaps like the weather it describes, and the echo of s-sounds in "I sprout my father's grin / his sad smile" makes the inherited expression feel stitched into the speaker's face. Line breaks do a lot of work. In "That someone would come / along but no, really you / have to save yourself," the break after "you" leaves the reader hanging for a beat before the blunt instruction arrives. In "Black bird on red ball," a string of one-syllable words bobs along like the bird itself, "preening for balance."
Traditional haiku leans on seasons and nature. Hamlin keeps those, with the first day of autumn, the shortest night of summer, and steam from a laundry in cold light, but he puts them beside beer, a pot clinic and a neon "OPEN." The Seahawks umbrella and Green Lake suggest a Seattle setting, though that is an inference from the text. The verses about people, with their wry commentary, sit closer to what is often called senryu than to nature haiku, and the mix is much of the poem's charm.
Water runs through the sequence almost like a secret refrain: beer, storm, a rolling can, the lake, steam, a well, a pot about to boil, and finally droplets heading for a drain. Pairs of verses also answer each other. In one, the speaker brushes a moth from beneath the neon sign, a kindness "no one notices." In the next, a smaller moth darts through the flame of a stove burner beside "one pot on to boil." The first is a rescue and the second a near-disaster. Likewise, the bus driver who "lets the cyclist live" is given a strange gloss: "Power, knowing that / you never get this moment / to regurgitate." The wording is odd, but it seems to say that power means acting once, with no chance to take it back. The driver's real power lies in restraint.
The voice is wry and often self-deprecating. Quoting "I am still freezing" from Tolstoy's account of a Russian winter turns a grand literary figure into someone shivering like everyone else. "Salutorious" is a made-up or half-remembered word that sounds like "salutary" and "salubrious," and it fits the shaggy affection in "this sticky universe." The word "sticky" also opens the poem at the tabletop, so the sequence is bookended by the same grubby texture. The speaker doesn't fight it. He wants "to dirty our hands."
What lifts the poem above a collection of observations is its last verse: "I want to believe / droplets slouching for the drain / oblige all I ask." The wish is small, even silly, since the droplets are lazy and hardly obedient. But "want to believe" admits that the speaker doesn't believe it. After a sequence that insists nobody is coming to rescue us and that credit is mostly luck, this is a human, funny and slightly desperate hope that the world might cooperate. The seasons aren't in order either, since autumn comes before the summer solstice, so the sequence follows mood rather than calendar. The poem's value lies in that honesty, and in how much it finds in a bar table, a moth and a drain.