Sixteen tiny poems, and hardly one of them stays still. Andrew Hamlin's sequence opens on a doubt about perception: two white trucks appear "out of this nightfall," nose-to-nose, and the speaker asks, "were they always there?" That question hangs over everything after it. What do we notice, and what is simply waiting for us to look? The verses read like a night-and-weather diary, jumping from a kiss to a pond to a melting pint of ice cream, with no plot except the mind moving through them.
The form is loosely haiku. Many tercets follow a 5-7-5 count, and "Raindrops fill a pond / in the parking lot, size of / a lake, to an ant" fits it exactly. Others slip, and "sitting awake" is only four syllables. There is no rhyme, and the lines break in the middle of phrases, on small words like "or," "of" and "but." Those breaks make the voice hesitate, as if each thought has to catch itself before finishing. The subject matter loosens the tradition too. Instead of a quiet landscape we get parking lots, a "transparent disc case" and "ticking baseboard heat." Nature is still here, but it arrives in a modern, half-ugly setting.
Storms are the recurring image. One passes as two young women kiss ("the laughter and glass"), one has a black edge "moving fast to the north," and the wind inside one sounds "like a small boy's whistle." Each time the storm is large, fast and out of anyone's control, and each time the poet notices something small beside it. This habit of shifting scale is the sequence's main trick. In the ant's view a puddle is a lake. In the gardener's world the speaker confesses, "how little / I know of it all!" That is the only exclamation mark in the sequence, and it comes out as humility, not drama.
Against that smallness the poem sets big words and lets them shrink. The speaker has dreamed "all my life" of glory, but doesn't know it "sitting awake." Immortality, meanwhile, was felt "for one pint" of ice cream. The joke is real, but so is the tenderness, because the claim is oddly believable. The most serious verse, "A thing sublime, this / all that can be done, is to / await its return," carries the idea. Its grammar is left unfinished, so "this" points at something the sentence never quite names. The sublime can't be made on purpose, only waited for. When it does come, "for a few seconds I float / above my raging," and the poem doesn't explain what the raging is.
The mood darkens and brightens abruptly. "Awful day, today, and that's / one thing we got right" is a wry shrug, and "Again I tell them / God does not exist; again / I get what's coming" gets its comedy from the repeated "again," which makes the speaker sound trapped in a loop. Then the closing verses widen. "Our team wins the game," cars honk "north and south," and the sun "waits to rise." The sun's waiting echoes the earlier verse about awaiting the sublime, and the cars' northward direction echoes the storm. Patterns like these bind the separate verses together without ever announcing themselves.
The last tercet leaves the speaker's own head: "These two enemies, / I leave them at the table / to share growing old." Instead of resolving a quarrel, it lets time do the work. Enemies and friends alike end up at the same table, ageing together, and the speaker walks away from them. Other verses pointed the same way. A woman walks "homeward in the dark" and remembers a friend "not seen for decades," and curiosity "leaves some of us still standing / and I miss the rest." Loss and time run under the jokes the whole way through.
The poem matters because it shows how a small form can hold a whole way of paying attention. No single verse is grand, but together they suggest that the sublime and the ordinary share the same street, and that glory, if it comes, comes by accident and for a few seconds. The sequence asks us to stay awake enough to catch it.