37 Haiku - Analysis

A collage that keeps confessing anyway

These 37 haiku read like quick snapshots that refuse to stay merely decorative. On the surface, they look like a playful heap of half-stories: barns, pirates, weddings, Buffalo, a pencil shattering on glass. But taken together they make a stronger claim: the poem is tracing what it feels like to try to love, remember, and speak clearly while the world keeps breaking into unrelated pieces. The speaker keeps reaching for intimacy—addressing a you, thanking someone for a book and year, insisting that love was a round place—and keeps getting answered by interruption: a star goes out, something happens in a garage, light turns into small squares, water drains away.

The tone is characteristically dry, quick, and a little amused at its own helplessness. Yet under the joke-logic there’s real anxiety: night gets dimmer each time, the past becomes a question, and the poem ends not with clarity but with a strained, minimal motion—I inch—as if progress itself has become suspect.

First reading: a chain of quirky one-liners

If you take each haiku as a standalone, the poem becomes a set of odd, bright remarks. One moment we’re in a domestic space with old-fashioned shadows; the next, the speaker is talking about blood traffic in a garage; soon after, someone blurts edit in the middle of admiring original artworks. This surface reading treats the poem as a social world of abrupt pivots: parties, property lines, side rooms, and overheard phrases. Even the more dramatic images—Pirates imitate ordinary people, witches pursuing a beast from eight sides—feel like costumes the mind tries on for a second.

In that mode, the poem’s comedy comes from mismatched registers. A solemn philosophical question—What is the past—is immediately undercut by A mental sandwich? The speaker’s intelligence keeps swerving into silliness, as if refusing to let big feelings speak in a single grand voice.

Second reading: the mind protecting a wound

But the recurring pressures—love, time, dimming, monstrosity—make the fragments feel less like random jokes and more like defenses. The opening line already frames love as trouble: that difficulty in love too soon. Immediately after, Some star or other went out, a cosmic way of saying something vital has disappeared, casually stated as if understatement could make loss manageable. The speaker’s address—and you—keeps returning like a hand reaching out, but each reach is followed by dislocation: garages, ball fields, barns, towers shuttered and put away. The settings are not destinations; they’re evasions.

Even tenderness arrives as postponement. You lay aside your hair is intimate, almost cinematic, but it’s paired with a chilling comparison: like a book that is too important to read now. What’s too important to face becomes something you defer, protect, and therefore lose access to. In this reading, the poem isn’t chaotic for fun; it’s chaotic because directness might hurt.

Light turning into squares: a quiet apocalypse

One of the poem’s clearest emotional through-lines is the way perception degrades. Night occurs dimmer each time, and light breaks into smaller and squarer pieces. That image matters because it makes the world feel digitized, reduced, or rationed—less a warm atmosphere than a set of fragments you can’t quite assemble. The poem keeps offering similarly partial objects: grains of grit, particles falling through a house, a blue anchor in a tall sky. Anchors belong to water; grit belongs to ground. Everything is slightly misplaced, as if the speaker’s inner life has misfiled the world.

The draining image sharpens the threat. A pencil on glass—shattered! is a tiny disaster with a clean sound to it, and then consequence arrives immediately: The water runs down the drain. It’s not just breakage; it’s loss moving away, irretrievable, ordinary. The poem suggests that what vanishes doesn’t vanish grandly. It just goes where water goes.

Love as place, love as argument

Against that dimming and draining, the speaker keeps trying to give love a stable geometry. Love was a round place is a strangely comforting idea: a space you can return to, a shape without corners where you won’t get trapped. The speaker even insists it will still be there two years from now, an oddly specific time-horizon that makes the reassurance sound practiced, like a pledge said to keep panic down. But the line is embedded in dispute: the speaker is arguing near a ball field, and someone has nearly undermined the brush—as if the very tools for making meaning (a brush, an artwork, language itself) are unstable.

This creates a central tension: the poem wants love to be durable, but it experiences the world as erosion. The haiku keep proposing footholds—weddings, barns, towers, property lines—then sliding away from them.

Monsters, pirates, witches: disguise as self-portrait

The poem’s fantasy figures don’t feel like escapism; they feel like sideways confession. Pirates imitate ordinary people, the speaker adds, myself for instance. The joke stings: if a pirate is someone who takes, raids, performs, then the speaker suspects their own everyday self is a kind of performance built on appropriation. That suspicion deepens with He is a monster like everyone else. The poem levels the category: monstrosity isn’t an exception; it’s a shared condition. The painful question is practical, not moral: what do you do if you’re a monster? The poem never answers, but it keeps moving, as if motion—new images, new scenes—is the only available coping strategy.

Even the enchanted wedding carries this doubleness. The wedding was enchanted and everyone was glad, which sounds like a memory the speaker wants to keep intact. Yet it sits among lines about bitterness—land with a bitter aftertaste—and separations: places that are separate and never exist. Happiness is present, but it’s surrounded by doubts about whether any place can truly hold.

A sharper question the poem won’t stop asking

When the poem says There are some places that never exist, it’s not only describing geography; it’s describing relationships and versions of the self. If certain rooms are only side rooms, and certain memories stick like pages in an old book, then what counts as the main story—what actually happened—may be exactly what the poem can’t reach without turning it into a joke, a pirate tale, or a mental sandwich.

The turn toward aftermath: no more pirates

Late in the sequence, the poem begins to sound like it’s coming down from its own improvisation. Too late the last express passes through dust of gardens: a missed departure, beauty already turning to residue. The Buffalo moment—In Buffalo she was praying—suddenly makes the poem’s wandering feel rooted in actual need. Prayer appears not as doctrine but as a human reflex when language fails.

By the time we get to the sea returned—no more pirates, the fantasy of theatrical identity drops away. What returns is something larger and indifferent, not enchanted—just tidal. The final line, I inch, is both bleak and stubborn: not a triumphant stride, but a minimal persistence through spare colors, past a twisted pole. The poem ends by admitting that meaning may not arrive as a revelation. It may arrive, if at all, as the decision to move one inch further through the scattered light.