Seventeen small poems, strung together like entries in a notebook, follow someone walking through a city in winter. The speaker rides escalators and buses, ducks into a teriyaki restaurant, watches gulls, a crow and strangers. Judging by the details (Sixth Avenue, a blood-drive ad, a Disneyland jacket), the city feels North American and ordinary. The title suggests one instalment in a numbered series. Taken together, the poems argue that tenderness survives in tiny, unplanned moments, and that loneliness is real but not worth dramatizing.
The form is loose. The opening is close to a classic 5-7-5: "This particular / shifting of the rain, I am / just in time for it." Many later poems slip off the count, and "Lemon-drop lamp" is noticeably shorter. Nothing rhymes, and punctuation comes and goes. Some poems end without a full stop, as if the moment simply kept going. The line breaks do much of the work. In the first poem, "I am" dangles at the end of a line, and then "just in time" arrives like a small stroke of luck. In the sixth, "leaving the mad / you'll notice I'm still here," two thoughts collide with no punctuation between them. The speaker admits to being among the people the crowd leaves behind, and says it as a dry joke.
The imagery keeps returning to surfaces and reflections. A "lemon-drop lamp" wavers in a cup of chai. Writing appears "backwards, / in the glass," so the speaker reads the world from the wrong side. A crow pokes at a "glass overhang." Colour works the same way. "Red clouds catching sun" fade into the dark "hole at Sixth Avenue" within minutes. A few poems later, the bus ad "Red cells save lives" appears in "black letters on white," a bare, almost graphic image. The red of the sky and the red of blood never connect outright, but the repetition makes the city feel like one continuous picture. Beauty and stark information sit side by side, and the speaker treats both with the same attention.
Other people's voices keep breaking in, always in quotation marks. A man feeds doughnuts to gulls: "I know it's wrong… But I've been hungry, too." A woman will stay with her partner "as long as he gives me mine," meaning her Disneyland jacket. The jacket is a souvenir of a fantasy place, now a bargaining chip in a very unfantastic arrangement. The speaker never comments, and the restraint is what gives these moments their sting. Even the comic poem, in which an abandoned box for "a synthetic urine kit" prompts the question "who left just the box?", has an odd pathos. The speaker's own needs are small and exact: "Every now and then / the teriyaki restaurant / has room to sit down." The poem suggests, though never says, that finding a seat is a small victory for someone who spends long days outside.
The emotional turn comes near the end. On Christmas Eve a single man sings, "one fragile strange tune," and later "Civilization, / so lovely, at least, as that / one flute in the hall." The hedge "at least" is telling. Civilization here is not cathedrals or crowds but a single instrument heard in a corridor, easy to miss. Then comes the last poem: "'Nobody loves me'– / no, actually, it's just / morning and breathing." The speaker raises the old self-pitying line and corrects it at once. A mood has been mistaken for a fact, and the plain physical present is enough to talk it down. Putting "no, actually" in the middle of a haiku is bold, because it makes the poem argue with itself.
What makes the sequence worth reading is how it stretches a tiny form to carry modern city life, with its ads, overheard scraps, reflections and awkward humour. It keeps the haiku's habit of noticing and drops its usual calm nature scenes. It could easily have turned bleak or sentimental, and it does neither. Its sharpest moment is one grin "and don't even care," a joy that arrives for no reason, beside a building and some sun, and asks for no explanation.