Fourteen tiny scenes are strung together here, and nearly all of them are about something slipping away: youth, desire, daylight, company. Yet the mood is rarely gloomy. The sequence opens with a woman who "giggles / at her grey pubic hair / through new glasses." Aging is taken in with amusement, and the detail that she can finally see clearly because of the new glasses gives the joke a tender edge. Poems that follow keep this tone, meeting small humiliations with a wry grin and then noticing something unexpectedly beautiful.
The beauty usually arrives through movement. A little girl on a scooter rides "in ellipses" while an ambulance waits nearby. The word is a clever double meaning. Her path is a set of loops, and the poem itself pauses on three dots, as if the ambulance's hovering threat were held in suspension. A man "pressure-washes / into the windstorm," a task that sounds hopeless, but the spray becomes "prancing spray-ghosts," and the futile chore turns into a small dance. The cyclist pedaling home hardly needs a comment at all, because the clink of Coke bottles in his "square basket" does the work. The hard *c* and *k* sounds in "Coke," "clink," and "basket" let us hear the ride.
The form helps. None of these poems follows the strict 5-7-5 pattern many students learn. The first has three syllables in its opening line, six in the next, and four in the last. The lines are uneven and unrhymed, with a short first line and a gap before the final image. The poet leans on punctuation instead. Ellipses ("An ambulance waits…", "Kicked to the curb…") and dashes ("This train / as it speeds–pushing / wind ahead") work like the cutting-points in traditional haiku, making us pause and then connect two things. Because many of these poems are about human foibles rather than nature, they sit closer in spirit to senryu, the sibling form that looks at people instead of seasons. The numbered title suggests a larger run of such pieces, though the text itself tells us nothing more.
The middle poems get more personal and more uncomfortable. "A fight I don't want / to have (she's thrown out / good bread yet again)" folds an entire marriage into a parenthesis. The bracket seems to mimic the speaker's attempt to hold the quarrel at arm's length. Then comes the bluntest joke: "A retreat; / melting ice…my erection / shrivels in my pants." The military pun on "retreat" and the cold, melting image make the moment funny and exposed at once. The speaker doesn't flatter himself. Elsewhere, "Kicked to the curb… / but I'm blessed with this stoplight / and a bracing freeze" turns rejection into an odd gratitude. The word "blessed" is almost certainly ironic, but the freeze really is "bracing," and the poem leaves both readings open.
Time of day and weather close the sequence in a quieter register. "This grey day / born half-dead, capitulates / to patient dark" personifies the afternoon as something weak, and "patient" makes night seem kind rather than frightening. The deaf man who "sees lightning / with his eyes closed" (the poem's wording is dated, but the image is striking) suggests that perception can run deeper than the senses we rely on. The final haiku, "Wednesday… / I pitch loneliness / to the gull, swooping," ends on a verb of throwing. Reading back, it may echo the bread thrown out earlier, as if loneliness could be tossed to a bird like scraps. That connection is an interpretation, but it fits the way the sequence keeps turning discarded things into small offerings.
What makes the sequence worth reading is its refusal to be grand. There are no speeches about mortality, only socks that get wet in rain boots, a desert city that "does not vibrate, does not ring," and a train "pushing / wind ahead." Each image is plain, but the plainness is deliberate. It suggests that a whole attitude to life, funny, bruised, and still watching, can fit inside three short lines.