She said,
You don’t want
to get on the dirty side
of a hurricane
because that’s what
kills people.

And that became
a central metaphor
for our relationship.

Don’t get on my dirty side,
she’d say, or I’ll mess you up.

Or I’d say,
The dirty side is moving in,
so you better back off.

And we always talked like that,
the way people talk about the weather,
but we never did anything about it.

(“Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.”–Mark Twain or possibly Charles Dudley Warner)