on Sunday afternoon, the smoke alarm won’t stop

despite the neighbours who don’t live there coming
and finally finding it in the red bin, head high

above the fence to ask me for forgiveness – it is easy
to join them in their embarrassment, our kinship

immediately possible against the noise,
even when they do ask if I’ll be here next year

and I laugh and say it’s not up to me.
they have the tenants moving in tomorrow

and when they leave, it’s quiet for twenty minutes, then again
the beep, insistent against the lawnmowers and drills,

a bird beside trilling in mimicry. left long enough
space will attune to any sound –

already the cicadas start to sound like a fuse
but that is my own mimicry – the way

I start to write this poem in the noise
before I realise what I’m doing, get up

and crawl behind the compost bin,
under the rusty nail in the fence gap,

walk through their yard, open the bin to find the disk,
its batteries still inside, and slide them out

and hear the silence hanging overhead.