Eleven small poems share one title and, it seems, one damp season. A siren fades in the rain, a child's fruit disappears into a sofa, a bicycle gets splashed, a mitten lies turned inside out at a bus stop. Nothing grand happens. The central idea is that attention is the real subject: the speaker notices the leftover, awkward, slightly ridiculous things most people step around, and treats them as worth a line. The number in the title suggests one instalment in a longer series, which fits the feeling of a notebook kept by someone who is always looking.
The construction is stricter than the mood. Counting syllables, every haiku here falls into a tidy 5-7-5, and that makes the jokes about rules land harder. One poem compares a fart to "a rule nobody follows" and then, with a wink, has it "passing the sniff test." Another asks, "Teach an idiot / to write haiku; do you still / have an idiot?" The question is self-mockery, but it is also a small boast, since the form is being handled with complete competence. The poems don't rhyme. They rely on sound instead, packing consonants into the lines: "high-pitched howl and soft spatter," "Splash–drench bicycle!" and the sticky, stalling rhythm of "half eaten, half-sticky, slid." Even the clipped sound of "wax plugs" gives the second poem a blunt, comic thud.
The imagery builds a recognisable weather. Rain appears in the first poem and returns in the umbrella, the splashed bicycle and the drain. The persimmon, traditionally an autumn fruit, together with the heater, the mitten and the bus stop, pushes the sequence toward cold. Red threads through it as well: the "red lips" in the second poem and the heater's "one red light" in the ninth. In a grey, wet landscape, red marks the small points of warmth or intimacy. The lips poem is the strangest. Kissing something red and putting it "back in their box," then finding wax in the nostrils, suggests a novelty object, but the poem never explains, and the oddness is the point.
Some of the best moments come from personification and simile. The runoff "swarms the drain," which is already "seven inches under," and the drain itself "gave up long ago," a tired, almost human phrase. The huge green umbrella "swallows his slim form whole," reversing the usual relationship between person and shelter, while the "last pay phone" on "the Ave" quietly mourns a vanishing object. The bicycle poem scolds the splash in the voice of a stern teacher: "Show some gratitude you've got / one purpose on Earth." The joke has a gentler undertone, because the line could be read as the speaker reassuring himself that a small purpose still counts. The inside-out mitten, its "wooly thumb / like a turtle's head," is the neatest image of all, a lost piece of clothing that suddenly looks like a shy animal retreating into its shell.
The ninth poem is the darkest. The heater's red light keeps the speaker company, and then comes "Moloch brought to heel?" Moloch is an old name for a devouring power, and Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" made it a symbol of a crushing modern world. The first poem's "howl" may be a coincidence, but a reader who knows Ginsberg might hear an echo. Either way, the question mark matters. A small domestic glow is asked to stand against something enormous, and the poem doesn't pretend to know the answer.
The sequence ends outward and upward. Two jays chase a train "due south / then bend to the sun." After rain, drains and cushions, the last image is of movement and light, and the birds' curve is the only line that leans toward hope. That is why the poem matters. It takes a form often treated as solemn and shows that humour, bodily comedy and real feeling can fit inside seventeen syllables, and that noticing small things carefully is a way of staying cheerful.