Night Sways
I lie down on the bed and face you.
You lie, turned away. You are still awake.
Thinking.
Your breathing tells me so.
I lie there and my world sways
with the swell of the deep oceans,
dipping and tipping.
At the same time everything lies perfectly still.
It is lighter in the night of the ocean world.
The moon hugs the ripples and sings
the stars out into the open.
Here in our bed with the curtains drawn
and the door closed and our phones turned over
the darkness eats the sound of the fan,
which in turn eats the sound of cars when they gasp by.
In here, in the dark,
the silence is louder than the fan
and the distance between your hand
and my arm is the distance of islands.
Even when we touch we do not meet.
The collision is numb,
numb as the rocking on this captain bed,
this raft bed.
The dark eats your form.
I hear your life and feel like I am spying on an alien,
on a machine in the middle of its work.
The bed continues to sway.
We remain on our sides.