March is the one constant in this sequence of twenty tiny poems. It turns up again and again, as "March…", "Late March…" and "Late March:", and it is a month of unsettled weather: sleet, thunderclaps, a thunderstorm, wind on a shaved neck. Winter has not quite gone and spring has not quite arrived, and the speaker lives in that gap. The poems drift between the sacred and the trivial, the personal and the public, but they keep returning to one habit: noticing. The central idea seems to be that attention is a way of surviving uncertain times, and that the small, odd, passing things are worth more than they look.
The opening poem sets the tone. "forgiven sins at last… / a roast beef sandwich" puts absolution and lunch side by side, and the ellipsis gives the reader a beat to wonder whether the sandwich is the forgiveness. The next poem turns the question inward: "At my death… / will even the wasted time / comfort me?" The speaker's worry about wasted time is answered, quietly, by everything that follows. Time spent watching a raven "strain its neck / for half an apple" or a "big fish in small bowl" eyeing the storm is the kind of time the speaker fears he has wasted, yet it fills the book.
The form is loose. The three-line poems do not follow a strict 5-7-5 count, and nothing rhymes. Instead the poet relies on cuts and pauses, mostly ellipses and the occasional dash, so each poem swings on a hinge between two things that shouldn't match. "Thick thud, / the cooper's mallet– / so much sleet!" gets its energy from sound. The thud and the sleet seem to land together, and the exclamation mark lets the speaker's surprise break through. Sound is everywhere: drums "like a dropped tire iron" followed by "gravel crunch," thunderclaps "quite like / a shoving match," dew's "effervescence" colliding with a jackhammer. The comparisons are domestic and rough, and they pull the sky down to street level.
The street is where the speaker seems to work. Judging by "She gets on my bus," he may be a bus driver, and the "drowsy train driver" and "stalled bus" suggest a mind that lives among transport. A cargo barge "dwarfs the ferry" downtown. The "madwoman" at the crossing becomes a passenger, and the parenthesis around "She gets on my bus" works like a small private shrug. This is a poetry of people glimpsed through a windscreen, never fully known.
Birds and insects keep breaking in. A bluebird asks, "Where do you call home?", the most direct question in the sequence, and the poem leaves it unanswered. The harlequin "eludes me," and the sultan "if he strains a bit / hears the cricket." That poem echoes the raven's straining neck, so power and hunger meet in the same effort to reach something small. The sultan's palace, for all its grandeur, can't shut out a cricket, and the humour has a democratic edge.
Some poems are stranger and more private. "He speaks to me / in the dreams I don't have / until summer" is a neat paradox, and the speaker waits for a voice that cannot arrive yet. "The Air Force man / holds a sapling, two feet / from the root ball" is almost pure image: a uniformed figure, a young tree, a measured gap. It doesn't explain itself, and that is part of its pull.
Two poems place the sequence in a particular moment, though this is an inference from the text. "She won't be vaccinated… / all I can do / is watch the birds" and the final lines, "And one day, / masks stacked cupboard… / thick dust," suggest the pandemic years. The speaker's helplessness turns into watching, which fits everything else in the book. The ending is a well-judged piece of compression. "Masks stacked cupboard" drops its articles like a note scribbled in a hurry, and "thick dust" echoes the earlier "Thick thud," so a loud sound has become a silent settling. The wording also offers a quiet hope, since dust gathers only when the danger has passed.
What makes the sequence worth reading is its refusal to rank experience. Angel whispers, a jackhammer and a sandwich all get three lines, and the poems suggest that a life is mostly made from such moments, not wasted by them.