Ocean Nocturne

A vinegar sky, the moon with its mouth full of cloud.

My words arrive in a squall of leaves, my silences

knotted as dragnets.  You gather them up like a prophet,

trusting the eyes of your hands with these difficult signs.

How to keep faith in love's instinct, the senses translating

the tangled regrets of a lover, the tongue sharp as flax?

Our bed is a refugee raft on a black heart of water.

The surge of your body shuts out the mute moon

and its questions, your shadow is sedative.

I take you in, on an ocean deep as need.