Sixteen three-line stanzas sit under one title, and the number in "Haiku 46" hints at a longer run of such pieces, though the poem itself gives no more than that. Most stanzas count out to the familiar five, seven and five syllables, but the form loosens when it likes: "The old man's hands / scarred, long ago" is much shorter than a strict haiku line. There is no end rhyme. The music is internal, as in "keepsakes", "keep me company" and "stinky feet", where hard k and p sounds make the speaker's loneliness sound faintly ridiculous. The overall effect is a notebook of glances rather than a single argument, and the glances keep circling one question: what does a small, easily distracted person actually know?
The early stanzas turn inward. A window "ticks once / at a brushstroke from the rain", so a sound is described as painting, and "wind keepsakes the rest" turns a noun into a verb, as if the wind were pocketing whatever the rain leaves unfinished. Then comes the unsettling question, "how many friends / can you have, if all you see / fills all that you know?" A mind that only sees what it already knows has no company except itself. The joke that follows, in which the teakettle whistles "in another room / along with my mind," shows how easily attention drifts away from the body.
Self-importance gets punctured again and again. The speaker is "proud of my words!", yet "the wall's one missing brick / knows more than I do." An absence turns out to be the teacher. The best joke is the epitaph stanza: "inconsequential" is a five-syllable word that fills a whole line, and it "won't do" for a gravestone because it would take "too much stonecutting." The speaker's insignificance would be hard work to record. A few stanzas later the self is "a tiny poem / blown across the walk", closer to a scrap of litter or a leaf than a monument.
Then the poem turns outward, and the world starts to look generous. A crow is "so excited / to have found its lime-green fence— / plus a parking sign!" The delight is real, and it is sharpest in the bonus of the sign. The moon shines "on one tongueless boot", and the word "tongue" quietly echoes the earlier stanza where banana milk, "drunk / years ago," returns "to my tongue." One tongue holds a memory and the other cannot speak, yet both are visited by something. Even the casual cruelty in "Excuse me, please" she whines, "tossing her perfectly good / pork chops in the trash" is noticed without comment, and its "tossing" is picked up by the butter "tossed in a pan."
Hands become the poem's quiet thread. The butter melts "from thumb and knuckles", so a pat of butter is given a hand's anatomy. The old man's hands are scarred, and they pour tea as if nothing about them needed explaining. The final stanza gives us only a sign: "Will work for $5 / an hour, or, spare any change?" Its two requests are tangled together, one dignified and one desperate, and the person holding it has vanished. "The sign sits alone." We have come full circle from the speaker's own solitude to a loneliness with much higher stakes. The sign also echoes the epitaph, because it is another piece of writing left behind to speak for someone.
What makes the sequence worth reading is its humility without self-pity. It borrows the haiku habit of looking hard at small things, but it doesn't take on a hushed, reverent tone. It admits to missed conversations, silly pride and smelly feet. Its argument is never stated, but the order of the stanzas makes it: if you are "inconsequential," you are free to pay attention to everything else, whether that is a crow, a boot, a scarred hand or a lonely piece of cardboard. The poem ends by handing that attention to the reader, and it asks what we will do with it.