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. Like me. Wifeless now, no kids,

we’re near sixty-eight, 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 this fog? Wister smiles at me with

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