Ten tiny poems share one title, and together they read like a page from a notebook kept by someone who watches everything closely and only slowly turns the attention inward. The sequence begins outdoors, with a woman "dressed for dinner" who stops to leave water for crows. It ends in a body: "crackers soothe my belly / a fan cools my brow." Between those two points, the poems keep drifting toward death and then pulling back. The central idea is that fear of mortality is not faced all at once. It is managed in small pieces, through looking, wondering, joking and, finally, physical comfort.
The form helps with this. Most of the three-line stanzas stay close to the five-seven-five pattern associated with haiku, though a few bend it. "Wakizashi" is a single four-syllable word standing alone as a line, and "44's pull-cord bell" runs a little long. There is no rhyme and almost no punctuation, so the poems feel like thoughts that arrive unannounced. Sound does quiet work instead. "Low hangs a boiled moon" is echoed by "farewell to low tides," as if the word "low" were sinking. "Dry dirt," "blind brain" and "boiled moon" are heavy with consonants, while "Leaden lump worry" makes worry sound like something swallowed.
The darkest stretch comes in the middle. The "boiled moon" and the "fingers stick[ing] up through the sand" make a strange, half-ghoulish picture. They could be seaweed or roots, but the word "farewell" nudges us toward something buried. A few poems later, the speaker imagines "dry dirt tossed over / my blind brain at mid-evening," and the final line, "three layers of black," is chilling because it does not say what the layers are. Dirt, evening and the dark inside a mind could all qualify. The wakizashi, a short Japanese sword, sits "behind glass at the museum," and the speaker asks "whose hand drew it last?" That question turns an object into a vanished person. Everything handled eventually ends up behind glass.
Against these shadows the poem sets ordinary life, often with gentle humor. A little girl chases a pigeon "while Dad / eyes the crosswalk light," a perfectly drawn picture of a child's carefree chase and a parent's steady watchfulness. The line break after "Dad" makes him almost an afterthought, then reveals his job: guarding against traffic, the everyday version of mortal danger. The "grass blade / sticking up brave through the snow" is the most hopeful image, and its detour is the most telling detail. Reaching it means going "south around the pond," so even small courage requires a roundabout walk. The poem does not claim that bravery is easy or direct.
Fear is named outright only once: "Afraid of death / to the point where I should write / 'so, so, so' in rows." The humor here is bleak but real. The speaker would have to fill a page with a meaningless, stammering syllable, like a schoolchild writing lines as punishment. The stanza also describes the poem itself, which is a row of short, hesitant utterances. Earlier, "No one notices / much about anything / so I think I'm safe" has the same dry edge. It sounds like comfort, but it is also a lonely admission, since being unnoticed is both protection and invisibility.
The bus poem is the most ambiguous. Judging by the "pull-cord bell," the setting is a bus, and as its ring fades into silence, "the lunatic shifts." The word could mean a restless passenger, but it also carries the old link to the moon, which hung over the poem earlier. The ending refuses grand answers. Dread arrives in the stomach, and relief comes as crackers and a fan. That modesty is what makes the poem significant. It suggests that facing mortality is not a single heroic moment but an accumulation of small, stubborn acts of attention and self-care, like leaving out water for the crows.