OpenMW did not have a controller profile for the uconsole buttons. adding the following to etc/openmw/gamecontrollerdb.txt fixed the issue:
03000000af1e00002400000010010000,ClockworkPI uConsole,platform:Linux,a:b1,b:b2,x:b0,y:b3,back:b8,start:b9,leftx:a0,lefty:a1,
I tweaked it from discussion here, but there may be a better way to handle this. Uconsole issues & fixes CM4 -R01- A06 thread