Eighteen short scenes, no title but a row of asterisks, and hardly one of them says what it means. Andrew Hamlin's sequence reads like the notebook of someone who mostly stays indoors: a child at the edge of the frame, a dog, a fridge, a pair of flies over a salad, and a speaker who comments on his own boredom, his body and his retreat. What holds the pieces together is a mood. The speaker keeps noticing small things, and he keeps stepping around anything large.
The form helps. Each unit is a three-line fragment that recalls haiku and senryu, but it doesn't keep to a strict syllable count. Lines run to four syllables or to eight, and the line breaks are often abrupt. "Grateful, at last, at / (farting my way through Thursday) / …enforced hermitude" leaves its first line dangling on a preposition, so the sentence only lands in the last line, and the joke arrives late. There is no rhyme, and the music comes from smaller things. "Cheeks" appears in the first fragment, with a child's sunscreen "like clown white," and returns later in "fresh-shaven cheeks against / my robe's collar." One is a face being covered and the other a face being uncovered, so the sequence seems to circle back on itself. Ellipses and parentheses do the work of rhythm. They are the speaker's hesitations, and "(I stay upstairs)" is a retreat made visible in the typography.
The imagery is comic and exact. A bumblebee clings to clover "like a taffy pull," which turns a stretching of sweetness into a physical image. Moths "go condo" in a bathroom, so insects become tenants. Two flies hover over chicken Caesar, "deaf to argument." Crows "have opinions," and the speaker half grants them the point, then complains that they menace "fragile music." Animals keep acting like people, and the people keep acting like animals. That exchange comes to a head when the dog "finished its days, / panting in the hay," and a few fragments later the speaker says, "As the dog is in / the early morn, so too / my own panting." The comparison is brief and unforced, and it is the closest the poem comes to naming mortality outright.
Absence is the other recurring effect. "How forlorn, / the truck's rumble / without the truck" captures a sound that outlasts its cause. "Imagination / disconnected, I tune / in to the night" describes a mind switched off and listening to whatever is left. Even the "Profundities" are reduced to "the faintest of echoes… / concrete garage," so depth turns out to be a sound bouncing around a car park. The poem keeps promising something profound and delivering something flat on purpose. The woodman's hat that "catches only one / falling star" is the most beautiful line, and the modest "only one" keeps it from becoming grand.
The poem also looks outward. "They're cheering for…what… / being alive after all?" suggests a crowd or a broadcast, and the speaker declines to join it. Robert De Niro, who "lets everything ride / on an eyelid twitch," gets a small tribute to how much a minimal gesture can carry. That is also a fair description of the poem's own method. "Today only, / black man on a black bike… / northward" is the most open moment. It sounds like a shop sign, it doubles the word "black," and it ends on a direction. The speaker watches someone pass and offers no commentary, which could be tact or could be distance.
The last fragment explains much of what came before: "Afraid to put on / Bill Evans… / so many depths." Bill Evans was a jazz pianist, and the speaker treats his music as something that might pull him under. By then the reader has seen the speaker's strategy: jokes, bodily grumbling, insects, appliances, and a refusal to feel more than he can manage. The earlier "Profundities… concrete garage" now looks like a defense, and "fragile music" and "faintest of echoes" start to read as one thread running through the poem.
The poem's significance lies in this honest, funny avoidance. It doesn't pretend that the speaker is brave. It shows a mind that knows where the deep water is and chooses, for now, to stay in the shallows and look at the bee on the clover.