A woman sits alone in a café, writing in a notebook, and wishes she could hear the people around her. A couple on a sofa talk too softly to catch, and the staff chatter as they clean up after the lunch rush. She gets only scraps. The fragments of overheard talk scattered between the stanzas, like "day old bagels" and "expensive to fly," mimic this: conversation arrives in broken, unconnected bits.
The speaker admits she is endlessly curious about strangers, even though their lives have nothing to do with her. Then she turns the idea around and imagines that they wonder about her too: who she is, what she writes, why she smiles at the river.
The ending shifts the mood. On her porch in the evening rain, with earphones on, everything is "simple, clear." She hears robins and distant peepers. The poem moves from the café's frustrating muddle to a quiet, happy sense of being in tune with the natural world.