Hans Ostrom’s “No Uncertain Term” stages a miniature scene of intimate speech in which the literal message never appears. A speaker asks for “a word” with someone, announces that the word is “apricot,” and then lets that word carry the whole emotional exchange. The poem’s real subject is not fruit but the way private meaning gets made between two people: a shared, arbitrary sign can become as charged as any direct confession, precisely because it is not explicit.
The first couplet toys with idiom. “I would like to have a word / with you” sounds like the opening of a serious talk, maybe even a scolding, but the next sentence deflates that expectation: “It is apricot.” The word is concrete, sensory, almost absurdly ordinary. By handing it over as if it were the key to the conversation, the speaker makes the listener—and the reader—wait for a significance that isn’t there yet. The title “No Uncertain Term” sharpens the joke: a term, in language, is supposed to fix meaning, yet “apricot” does not denote the thing that needs saying.
The poem quickly builds a ritual around the word. “It shall determine our exchange” sounds contractual, even ceremonial, and “Confiding apricot, I will lean in / and murmur” gives the fruit-word an almost human intimacy—the grammar hovers so that the word itself seems to confide. The speaker’s body language—leaning in, murmuring—does the work that literal meaning cannot. Meanwhile, “You shall pose / as one who understands” admits that understanding may be performed rather than guaranteed. The two people are collaborating in the illusion that a single word can hold whatever is unspoken between them.
The middle of the poem reveals the failure and the power of this code. “There’s something I’ve been meaning.” ends with a full stop after “meaning,” deliberately breaking the expected phrase “meaning to tell you.” The speaker is left suspended in intention, unable to complete the sentence. The next line, “To tell you,” is grammatically incomplete on its own, and what follows is not a confession but the same word again: “Apricot, I tell you.” The withheld content has been replaced by a sign, and the line break acts out the hesitancy of someone circling around a difficult thing.
By the final couplet, “apricot” has turned into an incantation. “Apricot, I say. Apricot, you realize” repeats the word until it starts to float free of its dictionary meaning. Each repetition asks the word to do a different job—first a thing told, then a thing said, finally a thing realized. The listener’s “realize” is crucial: what is realized may not be a hidden fact at all, but the shared recognition that apricot has become the message. That is the poem’s tender irony—the speaker never says what the something is, but the repeated word becomes a vessel for whatever intimacy the two are willing to grant it.
The poem uses no regular rhyme or metre, instead moving in short couplets with frequent enjambment. The stop-start rhythm mirrors the awkwardness of a confession that cannot quite arrive. “Apricot” itself is a soft, round word, full of open vowels and gentle consonants, yet repeated it grows strange, almost ceremonial. Its very ordinariness is the point: intimacy does not require a special vocabulary, only a shared willingness to mean something together.