Fourteen haiku, one long bus ride through a wet, unglamorous city: "Haiku 41" reads less like a single poem than a notebook kept by someone who, as one stanza admits, has "nothing better but / to record." What gets recorded is a run of small scenes: a pigeon, a flagger in orange, a man preparing a syringe, a crow with a takeout box. Together they argue that attention is a way of surviving a hard place, and sometimes a way of finding grace in it.
The voice is set by the opening stanza. "He didn't shoot me / for looking at him funny / so here I am now" treats a brush with violence as an anticlimax. The shrug in "so here I am now" is the poem's armor, and the speaker keeps it on throughout. The next stanza mocks official language with "I'll file my report," then turns the hangover into a theft: "the whiskey ran off with my night / leaving splintered sun." Whiskey becomes a petty criminal, and the morning light arrives in shards. The comedy is real, but it sits close to something sadder.
In form, the stanzas mostly follow the haiku's 5-7-5 pattern and loosen it when speech demands. "The whiskey ran off with my night" runs well past seven syllables, and "in bright orange; excavator" does too. There is no rhyme. Instead the poem relies on line breaks that fall on weak, hanging words, as in "And I'm lumped in with / this whole busload" or "Nothing better but / to record." The sentences tip over the edge of each line, which gives the poem the slouch of a person talking to himself. The traditional haiku cut, the gap between two images, is used bluntly in "Hoodied, with gnarled hands / assembling a thin syringe / Happy Thanksgiving." No connective tells us whether the greeting is sincere, bitter, or just what the calendar says. The reader has to decide, and the discomfort is the point.
Haiku traditionally carry a seasonal marker, and here the blossoms and cicadas have been swapped for "the fall storm," Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Judging by those references, the sequence moves through the darkening end of the year. Weather is a constant, with windshield wipers, puddles, "cold speckles / filling the pothole," and finally "between showers." Sound blurs with suffering in "A drowning man's wail / or windshield wipers on glass / sound the same downtown," which says more about urban indifference than any complaint could. The best consolation is a joke made of light: "Absent any sky / arc lamps schpritzer in puddles / passable starlight." The playful spelling of "schpritzer" and the grudging "passable" show someone making do and refusing to be gloomy about it.
Animals keep drifting through, and they often behave better than people. The pigeon might "wander through the doors / of the southbound train," a commuter like the rest. A pigeon and a seagull "share silent rooftop sunbreaks." A gecko waits out the crickets' song before it "decides on dinner," a quiet reminder that appetite runs under every scene. Then the final crow opens a takeout box "with its beak," a scavenger's ingenuity set against a throwaway city. Human kindness appears just as sideways. In "He shares lollipops / with the sniping punk couple," the sweetness is small and slightly absurd, and so more believable. The poem undercuts any rising sentiment with plain bodily comedy, as in the bus so slow that "the piss filling my bladder / tops out before home."
The poem matters because it puts a very old, delicate form to work on ugly, funny, tender material. The mention of Belltown, a Seattle neighborhood, anchors it in a real city rather than a postcard. It refuses both pity and cynicism. The speaker neither rescues anyone nor looks away, and he ends on a crow eating scraps in a pause in the rain. Noticing is all he claims to be doing, and the poem suggests that this can be enough to get through a bad season.