1 There's a small house with rooms in different sound zones  
With a dining room surrounded by others  
Whatever is said in one room stays there  
If you want to talk to someone in another room  
You Shout  
Or if you hear a shout, and you're not a shouter  
You walk to the room where you heard the voice and ask, ‘What were you saying?'  
2 Behind the house the garden provides lemons  
From a tree that shares its fruit  
With three other households year around.  
At the place where the fences meet, a fruiting branch  
Meanders into each yard  
The garden provides a landing place  
For many other things  
Life's energy passes through continually  
Much you can find in that yard is remarkable  
One day a stream of  
Painted ladies passed through  
For an hour  
3 Outside the gate, from the driveway, I see the stranger (from the next building?)  
Smoking on the sidewalk  
Once an hour he stands outside his abode and consumes a fag  
He gives me a sidelong glance  
When he finishes, he goes back in  
I stay and wonder at people's differences  
And how we can't know others without the time  
Then I go back with the butterflies and poppies and leave myself  
4 Out in the yard and knowing I'm wearing goggles  
And ear plugs as a result of my limited upbringing  
I try to imagine what I might hear and see without them  
If I could tune in to the music of the spheres and talk to the trees  
So to speak  
Or sometime enter the evermore (If the house would be here when I got back)  
Then I might frequently travel, and freely  
5 There is a tree nearby that's called  
Ever fruit When I sit in my nest I can see the avian neighbors  
Sitting in it like decorations that come and go  
How can this small parcel be so alive and varied?  
I am cleaning my pipe beneath the lemon tree  
When my eyes focus on the big sooty-white cat  
The one that usually scares  
Sleeping in the place where the fences intersect  
In the middle of the pokey branches