I.  Pictures

"No darling, oceans don't
freeze.  Now come away

from the water and we'll
get some nice lunch."

The briny ocean will freeze, just as the kettle
will sing, but not while we're watching.

She's waiting for us to turn our heads,
but she has her price, her point of bending.

Sometimes we catch the kettle.
Sometimes -- icebergs.

The man I live with redefines intimacy
again and again, and I let him. I scribble

in my dictionary, crossing out
the extra words with a thick black pen. 

Rules are not lies, but they're negotiable,
and made of something ordinary.  Made of

chewing gum that re-softens in my mouth
each time I pull it from the bedpost. 

II. Words 

Ocean-
1.) I went there one summer and a nasty seagull sneaked a slice of lunchmeat from my paper plate without ever landing. 2.) Always Atlantic, gray and colder than she looks. 

Kettle-
1.) Old yellow thing with a burnt handle, stained, but still perfectly useful, for goodness sake.  2.) Always with its inch of tired water, but you can't see how tired it is, because the water is inside.  3.) Eventually, tea. 

Intimacy-
1.) You'll know it when you see it.  2.) Anything that lasts longer than it needs to, sentence, look, hand on shoulder.  3.) I mean to say, it lingers.  I mean both things.

 III.  Conclusions

You're driving past an unfamiliar girl in an unfamiliar town when you turn the steering wheel, turn yourself the wrong way onto a one-way street.  You can tell immediately that something is very misplaced, but it takes you a second to realize that the misplaced thing is you.  It takes you even longer to find the words, "wrong direction." 

By then, the woman who was driving toward you in her blue sedan is already up on the grass in somebody's yard, screaming and shaking a fist.  But your car is still moving.  It keeps moving. 

So you turn the steering wheel again, slam your foot on the gas, tear through an intersection, change lanes three times, weave, pull out of town.  Now you're on a highway, on a two lane highway alone, singing with the radio, laughing out loud.

Direction- 1.) The way you are facing at this moment in time.  2.) The other way, the way you can't see yet.  There behind you.   Arbitrary, necessary, there.

                                                            Laurel Snyder

Copyright 2002, Laurel Snyder

nidus is an online publication supported by the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh's English Department.