18.

 It's been, say, five years since I've been back here at
this hour, Evening starting its light-curling plane
        under the clouds, The east-shrugged, flamingo clouds, Everything
different now, and everything just the same. Except the leaves and
birds,
       great-grandchildren, and great-great.
It's not tomorrow I'm looking forward to, it's yesterday,
Or, better yet, the day before that. The wind keeps gossiping in both my
ears for nothing. I can't go back there, No matter how juicy the
stories are,
       no matter how true, or untrue.
We don't know much, really, but we do know some things. We know the
people we learned from,
       and know what we learned. We have to be humble about that-- I
know what I got, and I know where I got it from, Their names inscribed
in my Book of Light.
All the while we thought we were writing for the angels, And find, after
all these years, Our lines were written in black ink on the midnight
sky,
Messages for the wind,
       A flutter of billets-doux From one dark heart to the next.
      from "18, Section 1" in
 Littlefoot (Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
       2007
)