I have a friend who is a prep chef in a nice restaurant with a view of the harbor in Camden, Maine. He is a hard working guy who likes to eat and drink. We kept running into each other at live concerts and became friends. One day he asked if I would please lend him a copy of “Hold Me Fast”. I do not carry copies around with me so I didn’t have one to give him. He thought this was a major promotional defect on my part and every time I saw him he would nag me about the CD. I told him that it was available in the library (which we were standing in front of at the time) but that did not satisfy him. So I put the audio book in my car and drove to the restaurant and made it a point to leave the CD for him at the bar.

A few days later, I am walking down the sidewalk in the center of town on a warm afternoon, tourists and locals are everywhere, cars are bumper to bumper with their windows open to the sea breeze. It’s a perfect summer day in Maine. I hear this voice yelling at me, “Domench!”

I turn around and see my friend across the street. He is grinning and pointing at me. He yells again, “Domench!” I stop walking. The entire street quiets. Shoppers, drivers, and passengers are now watching him and watching me. Heads turn back and forth. He yells, “Domench, you wrote those stories! You f—ing freak!” He laughs and walks on, satisfied.

Literary criticism.

My friend, the poet Dennis Sampson, sent me a poem about the glory of being a writer. It is by the 1991 Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mona Van Duyn. She was the first woman Poet Laureate of these United States.

The Vision Test

My driver’s license is lapsing and so I appear in a roomful of waiting others and get in line.

I must master a lighted box of far or near, a highway language of shape, squiggle and sign.

As the quarter-hours pass I watch the lady in charge of the test, and think how patient, how slow, how nice she is, a kindly priestess indeed, her large, round face, her vanilla pudding, baked-apple-and-spice face in continual smiles as she calls each “Dear” and “Honey” and shows first-timers what to see.

She enjoys her job, how pleasant to be in her care rather than brute little bureaucrat or saleslady. I imagine her life as a tender placing of hands on her children’s hands as they come to grips with the rocks and scissors of the world. The girl before me stands in a glow of good feeling. I take my place at the box.

“And how are you this lovely morning, Dear?

A few little questions first. Your name?–Your age?–

Your profession?” “Poet.” “What?” She didn’t hear.

“Poet,” I say loudly. The blank pink page of her face is lifted to me. “What?” she says. “POET,” I yell. “P-O-E-T.”

A moment’s silence. “Poet?” she asks. “Yes.”

Her pencil’s still. She turns away from me to the waiting crowd, tips back her head like a hen drinking clotted milk, and her “Ha ha hee hee hee” of hysterical laughter rings through the room. Again “Oh, ha ha ha ha ha hee hee.”

People stop chatting. A few titter. It’s clear I’ve told some marvelous joke they didn’t quite catch. She resettles her glasses, pulls herself together, pats her waves. The others listen and watch.

“And what are we going to call the color of your hair?” she asks me warily. Perhaps it’s turned white on the instant, or green is the color poets declare, or perhaps I’ve merely made her distrust her sight.

“Up to now it’s always been brown.” Her pencil trembles, then with an almost comically obvious show of reluctance she lets me look in her box of symbols for normal people who know where they want to go.

– Mona Van Duyn