Twelve tiny poems sit under one numbered label, "Haiku 65", and together they sketch a summer in which the speaker barely moves. He lies still, lies flat, hesitates over the alarm, while the world does all the acting. A breeze combs his hair, a truck roars, a dog shakes itself off. The central idea seems to be that attention is a kind of leisure. If you lie quietly enough, ordinary things start to perform for you.
The form is loose. The lines are too uneven for a strict 5-7-5 count: "game breeze" has two syllables, "combs my hair" three. This is haiku in its compressed English style, where short lines leave room for silence. Ellipses and dashes do the work of the traditional "cut," the breath between two halves of an image. "Slow July… / water pauses / in the sink" is a good example. The ellipsis is the slowness, a drop hanging at the edge before it drains. There is no rhyme, but the sound is carefully tuned. "Clacking the leaves" imitates its own noise with hard k-sounds. "Pigeon pecks / between street seams" ticks along on p's and s's like the bird's beak. In "two dandelion seeds / dance the wind," the repeated d's make the seeds seem to bounce, and "dance" used as a transitive verb turns the wind itself into the dance floor.
Humor runs through the sequence, and it often comes from treating things as people. "Game breeze" makes the wind a willing playmate. The speaker is "a poor host" because some of his books "can't stand up straight," as if guests were slouching on his shelves. The Monday truck is "confident for the week," which borrows a human swagger the speaker clearly does not share. Even the dachshund is only a squeak "beyond the fence," a character known by sound alone. The speaker mostly listens, and that is why so many of the poems rest on sound or on mild uncertainty. "Rain…? / Or just wind / clacking the leaves?" is a small mystery solved, or left unsolved, by ear.
Some images open sideways onto something larger. "Downtown Jesus… / spiderweb, / cheek to shoulder" is the strangest. Judging by the imagery, it may describe a figure of Jesus with a web strung from cheek to shoulder. The poem never says so, and that gap is the point. The sacred and the neglected share a city corner. "Lying flat… / hoping to catch / galactic drift" stretches the scale from a body on the ground to the movement of galaxies, and the word "hoping" keeps it gently absurd. The gravel beach poem plays with order. We get the result, "instantly damp," before the cause, "dog shaking off," so the reader has the little surprise of watching the explanation arrive late.
The final poem pulls the sequence into focus. "Switch off the alarm! / perforce, to save / one dream" is the only exclamation in the set. "Perforce" is a stiff, slightly grand word dropped into a casual voice, and the mock-formality is funny. It suggests that choosing sleep is almost a duty. It also loops back to the opening, "I lie still," so the whole sequence can be read as one long drowsy morning. The shifts between afternoon, evening and Monday, and the dreamlike jumps from a spiderweb to the galaxy, would fit that reading. This is an inference from the text, not a certainty.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it asks for. Haiku is often imagined as mountains and temples, but here the material is a sink, a dachshund, a pigeon on pavement and a truck on a weekday. Modern life is not treated as an interruption of attention. It is the subject. Against the roar of Monday, the speaker's stillness starts to look like a quiet, good-humored resistance, a decision to save one dream and notice a few small things before the day takes over.