Eighteen three-line poems sit under one title, and none announces a subject. Read in order, they behave like a notebook kept by someone who rides buses and sits up at night: a stilled crane, a cedar branch, a driver, a woman with red shoulders at sundown, a heater, a hill, a pen, bed. The central idea seems to be that attention is itself the subject. The speaker looks hard at small things, then keeps turning the gaze back on the one doing the looking, and is not always flattered by what turns up.
The form is haiku in a relaxed sense. The lines hover near the familiar short-long-short shape, but the counts wander. The opening poem runs roughly four syllables, then eight, then five. There is no rhyme and no seasonal reference. The city stands in for nature, and bodies and bus routes crowd in where blossoms might be. The endings are often very short, a single word like "sundown" or "surety", so each poem drops away abruptly, like a step that isn't there. Line breaks do comic work too. "Give me a whistle when I'm / nude at the window" pauses on "I'm" for a beat before the confession lands. Dashes, an ellipsis and several question marks keep the punctuation loose and conversational, as if thinking were happening on the page.
Many of the images work by turning things into animals. A stilled crane becomes "a cat at attention, / triangular head". (Given the later "workmen", it may be a construction crane rather than a bird, and the poem never says.) A left hand is "like a starfish", and the speaker deadpans that if you watch "sensibly" for long enough, "it may move an arm." That adverb is the joke: patience presented as a scientific method. A cedar branch is "bent like a worm", and a street hiss is "as if a snake would chitter". Even the speaker joins the animal kingdom in the wry "wise gas exchange", serving the Earth by "slinging CO2". The branch, notably, is "much older / than this argument". We never learn what the argument is, but the line shrinks it beside a tree's slow time.
Sound runs through the sequence as well, and the poem keeps contradicting itself about it. A voice from a man in plaid headgear is "like the end of the world". An accordion and an "ancient Russian choir" play somewhere beneath the floor. The bus heater is "declaiming hollow language", personified as a speechmaker with nothing to say. Then there is the hill climbed "no sound of the motor", and the street where "no one goes anywhere" despite the hiss. Noise and quiet trade places, and the reader senses a mind tuned to what is half-heard.
The sharpest turns come where the tone flips. "A serious thing, death, / and also two white lights / on three white walls" announces a weighty subject and then refuses to stay with it. "And also" puts mortality and a plain room on the same level. The question about Hemingway ("a sad Christmas seal?") is left hanging, as unsure as the speaker's other guesses. Behind the jokes sits the poem's most honest moment: "What else might I / be wrong about, given so much / time and passion?" The hedging words that recur ("might", "may", the question marks) turn out to be the poem's real grammar. Even the small moral of washing "only / the hand that's been in the piss" is delivered as "surety", a word that sounds firm and may be gently mocking itself.
The last poem closes the day with a mismatch: hand and pen "feel charged", but "it's time for bed". The body is ready to write while the mind is spent.
The poem's significance lies in what it does to a very compact form. It keeps haiku's habit of noticing but gives up its calm, letting in embarrassment, jokes, bodily detail and self-doubt. The result is a portrait of a modern mind at work, more interested in being truthful about what it sees than in being wise about it.