Visitors to the Zoo

On a warm night in June
I went to the zoo, sat on one of the benches,
and drank from a bottle of iced tea. Two visitors
came up beside me to drink as well.
This is hardly amazing, I thought, and who would even note such a thing?
The visitors eyed me from time to time, glancing
and nodding. I felt the need to respond, so I nodded, too,
but haltingly, as though not really wanting to be seen.
The visitors must have sensed that I was holding back.
They moved slightly away. Then I thought they might have known me
in another life--the one in which I was a poet.
They might have even read my poems, for back then,
in that shadowy time when our eagerness knew no bounds,
we changed styles almost as often as there were days in the year.