It Is Summer and the Neighbors Are Yelling

I have stepped outside to listen.
The couple above—one lover
from one country, the other another—
yell because they are here,

together, trying to live the same story.
The couple below yell because
one lover is drunk and the other doesn’t
drink enough. None of them know

how their voices, like neighborhood
sirens, have invited me to investigate—
a bystander at their wreckage, a quiet
voyeur with nothing to say.

*

In my own yard between us all, the hives
hum—two cedar boxes boiling with wild
colonies lured by the scent of their own past.

Their thrum is insistent, but the bees say
everything that matters with scent and dance:
the slow yellow arc of sun, a gray specter

of cloud, the flavors of fields and forests
beyond our road. Nothing concerns
these bees so much as the weather.

*

To the neighbors, still yelling: I will offer
this harvest of honey; a tongue can be silenced

with a drop of something sweet. Then, together,
we will listen: our breaths, our bees, our blue

horizon of nothing but so many whispers.
We wouldn’t make out a single word.