Edited and introduced by Wesley McNair, Maine poet laureate.

The late Philip Booth, a resident of Castine, lived in a house that had been in his family for five generations. Here, he describes an encounter with a fellow townsman and childhood friend.

Fog-Talk

By Philip Booth

Walking the heaved cement sidewalk down Main Street,

I end up where the town bottoms out: a parking lot

thick with sea-fog. There’s Wister, my boyhood friend,

parked on the passenger side of his old Dodge pick-up.

He’s waiting for Lucia, the girl who drives him around

and feeds him, the one who takes care of him at home.

Wister got married late. Wifeless now, no kids, he’s near

sixty-eight. Like me. Watching the ebb, looking out into

the fog. Fog so thick that if you got shingling your roof

you’d shingle three or four courses out onto

the fog before you fell off or sun came. Wister knows

that old joke. Not much else, not any more. His mind drifts

every whichway. When I start over to his old pick-up,

he waves to my wave coming toward him, his window half up,

half down. He forgets how to work it. I put my head

up close. Wister, I say, you got your compass with you

to steer her home through the fog? Wister smiles at me with

all sorts of joy, nodding yes. He says I don’t know.

Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 1999 Philip Booth. Reprinted from Lifelines, Viking Penguin, 1999, by permission of Philip Booth. Questions about submitting to Take Heart may be directed to Gibson Fay-LeBlanc at mainepoetlaureate@gmail.com or 207-228-8263. “Take Heart: Poems from Maine,” an anthology collecting the first two years of this column, is now available from Down East Books.