Andrew Hamlin gives his poem no title, only three asterisks, and the choice suits what follows. It reads like pages from a notebook: fourteen brief fragments, then a closing piece labelled "tanka." Nothing announces a subject, but the poem keeps circling a loss ("His lips / (my only man)"), a lingering sorrow ("still mourning"), and a year the speaker calls "horrible." Its central idea comes in the thirteenth fragment, where the speaker tries to "Stretch / horrible year wide enough… / extract happiness." The verb matters. Happiness here is not found or received but pulled out by effort, like a splinter or a stubborn tooth.
The construction is spare. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The rhythm comes from line breaks and from the ellipses that split many fragments in the middle, a held breath before the turn. "Anniversary… / their teeth can now kiss / without their mouths" shows the method. The pause leaves the reader a moment to wonder whose anniversary this is, and then the image arrives, tender and grim at once. Teeth that "kiss" without mouths could be dentures in a glass or the remains of a long-dead couple, and the poem never says which. Most fragments run to three lines with a hinge in the middle, so the poem keeps a steady, small beat. That fits the line "My thumb against / the heel of my other hand… / slowed pulse," where the speaker seems to be checking his own heartbeat and calming it.
Hamlin's images are small, domestic and slightly off-kilter. A "battered can" rolls north, and the clatter becomes "Such language," as if loneliness had to settle for whatever speech the street offers. Later, "leaf-blower drone fades, / trudging north." The grammar is loose enough that the sound and the speaker both seem to be trudging, so the machine's noise and the man's mood merge. Both northward journeys end nowhere in particular. Elsewhere, "The horse / and the spider, / either side of the field" sets two creatures of wildly different size at opposite edges of the same space. The empty field between them is the real subject.
Certain images return and gather weight. Stubble appears twice, on the speaker ("rain on my stubble / and breath") and on the lost man ("cracked stubbly dry"), a quiet link between the two bodies. Blades and edges recur as well: "One broken blade / in a cave… / too far from the sun," then a bar of soap "shrunk / down to a dagger." The soap is the neatest of these. Months of ordinary use have worn it into a weapon, which is a small picture of how time sharpens as it diminishes. The strangest image is "The Buddha, / what can it feel… / snail down one cheek." A statue meant to represent calm seems to weep, because the snail's trail reads as a tear. The speaker's question about what the figure can feel feels like a question about himself.
Against these losses, the poem sets nature that has lost its timing: "Cherry blossoms, / rushed this year– / forgot their sunlight." Judging by the imagery, the blossoms mirror the speaker's own sense of a year gone wrong. The "broken blade" that is "too far from the sun" shares the same lack of light. Then there is the gamble of "My two fingers / hold two cards… / the storm breaks," which echoes the earlier "I'm risky" and leaves open whether the storm is danger or release.
The closing tanka answers the sun that kept going missing. It is not strictly syllabic, but its five lines form one clean, unbroken movement with no ellipses and no "I": "Sunray to earth / then a white wall / rebounds brilliance / to illume / the gull's underwings." Light does not reach the bird directly. It strikes the ground, bounces off a wall, and only then lights the underside of the wings, a part of the gull that is usually in shadow. This is the poem's answer to its own instruction to "extract happiness." Comfort arrives at an angle, secondhand, and it still counts.
Hamlin's achievement is restraint. He never explains the grief or names the year's troubles, and he trusts a rolling can, a shrinking soap bar and a snail on a statue's face to carry the feeling. The fragments are lonely individually, but together they build a mood of endurance, and the last image earns its brightness because everything before it has been so carefully dim.