Ocean Nocturne
By Esther Ottaway
Published 19 October 2023
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.