A kiss begins the poem, but it is also an interrogation. The lover's tongue is trying to "tease out / the secret of my silence", as if intimacy were a tool for prying something loose. The speaker refuses and keeps that secret "hidden / like / a garden / full of dead / & dying / flowers." The poem never says what the secret is. Judging by the imagery of poison, death and resurrection, it could be grief, damage or depression, but the text deliberately leaves it unnamed. Its central idea is that being open does not have to mean being forced open. Trust, not pressure, is what finally gets the speaker to risk letting someone in.
The garden image is more surprising than it first looks. Gardens are usually things we show off, yet this one is concealed, and it is made of dying plants. Silence here is not emptiness but something alive and decaying that the speaker tends in private. The line breaks make the reader slow down over it. "Like" sits alone on its own line, and "& dying" is pushed to the right, so the flowers seem to wilt across the page. The poem's shape does a lot of work for it. Lines drift rightward at "Somehow" and again at "or swim", which makes the final words look as if they are sinking or floating off.
The best move in the poem is a small change of wording. The first stanza opens "With your tongue in my mouth"; the second opens "With your tongue in your mouth." The pressure of the kiss gives way to speech, and the lover now "make[s] sounds" rather than demands. Those sounds do what the kiss could not. They "unfold my rib cage", a verb that quietly turns the ribs into petals and links back to the garden. Then comes the poem's most memorable line: "bones need not be broken / to be open." It reverses our usual picture of exposure, where being opened means surgery, injury or confession under duress. The organs are called "strange", which suggests the speaker feels estranged from their own body, and the lover handles them gently, "in your hands".
Water takes over in the second half, and the title, "Ocean Eyes", finally pays off. The speaker sees a "blue reflection" in the lover's eyes, and the "poison in these organs" rises "like vapour to the sky." The image follows the real movement of water: the sea gives off vapour, and the poison goes up with it. Healing is described as evaporation, not as a struggle. The word "reflection" matters too, because the speaker is being shown themselves, perhaps for the first time without shame. Notice that the poem says "somehow" twice. The speaker cannot explain why this works, and the honesty of that gap makes the recovery more convincing than a neat explanation would. "That ocean brings me back to life" also implies that the speaker had been, in some sense, dead, which gives the dead flowers a retrospective weight.
The poem ends on a reversed invitation. At the start the lover's tongue pushes in; now the speaker says, "let me in / & see / if I will sink // or swim." Consent has replaced intrusion, and the speaker is now the one who chooses. "Sink or swim" is a worn phrase, but the ocean imagery gives it new life, and the risk falls on the speaker alone. The speaker does not promise to be saved, only to try. The blank space before "or swim" makes us wait through the possibility of sinking.
The poem is free verse with no rhyme scheme, and its music comes from softer repetitions: the hush of "silence" and "secret", the paired d's of "dead & dying", the long vowels of "blue", "ocean" and "rise". The ampersands give it a casual, spoken quality. What makes it worth reading is how much it does without rhetoric. In about thirty lines it shows a mind guarding itself, the exact moment that guard lowers, and the fear that follows. Its answer to the secret is not to reveal it but to say that some silences can only be entered by invitation.