When Once Friends

I can tell this fairly quick,
the two narrative lines sharing a common angle
and there being mist in both instances.
As for why my friend and I
were running a rented fishing boat
through morning fog on dead reckoning,
it was a matter of wanting to arrive early and alone
at the shrimp farm where sea trout
were working along the fence for strays.
More than anything I remember the angle,
something sure and strict in my reading,
of the cabin cruiser that came out of the fog
and crossed our bow close enough for us
to know again it was not our special selves
or anything our wives knew about greyhounds
that had paid us eleven-to-one on two-dollar bets
at the dog track the night before.
A name on the racing form more lyric than the next,
a combination of favored colors in the silks,
the worn luck of the draw,
were what bought us beer in green bottles
instead of cans for the weekend.
The cruiser never looked back
at my friend and me and our luck
rolling in their wake.
The other angle was of a plane in the clouds,
the only time I’ve ever been ferried by private charter.
Going up through cloud cover
the young pilot said he didn’t have radar
and had never been to where I was going,
so we’d have to come back down through the clouds
in a calculated while and look around for a landmark.
His co-pilot pointed to a symbol
for a checkered water tower on the chart.
All I could add to the basic rhopalic of clock,
compass, and radio was another eye,
the one pointing my finger toward the Cessna
that had just slipped through the gauze
of our future like a cruiser
and laid down for the second time in my life
the providential angle.
Those twin incidents were long
ago and whatever has made
my friend remote and finally silent
as he goes about his days
is as hidden to me as the way two such moments
could conform so in texture and geometric circumstance.
One other thing:
after we found the water tower
and were parked on the runway,
the pilot walked around the nose of the plane
to where I was standing with my bags.
He reached up and broke a sleeve of ice
from the leading edge of the wing
and offered half to me.
His co-pilot had forgotten to fill the water jug.
After a few minutes of small talk
he taxied up the runway,
lifting into the overcast winter.
I stood there beside the one road leading in,
waiting for my ride and thinking of how the morning
cleared on the wide sound
and we caught the speckled trout
our wives broiled with pimiento and Parmesan,
lemon and parsley.
we drank the beer in green bottles,
saying the wonderful names of the winning hounds
all through the evening.
That was what I remembered that winter day
and what I remember now is both that and the angle—
and standing there on the small runway,
eating the ice of unknowing alone,
its cloud, where we had been.