Incompatibilities

Desire's a vicious separator in spite
     Of its twisting women round men:
Cold-chisels two selfs single as it welds hot
     Iron of their separates to one.

Old Eden commonplace: something magnets
     And furnaces and with fierce
Hammer-blows the one body on the other knits
     Till the division disappears.

But desire outstrips those hands that a nothing fills,
     It dives into the opposite eyes,
Plummets through blackouts of impassables
     For the stars that lights the face,

Each body still straining to follow down
     The maelstrom dark of the other, their limbs flail
Flesh and beat upon
     The inane everywhere of its obstacle,

Each, each second, lonelier and further
     Falling alone through the endless
Without-world of the other, though both here
     Twist so close they choke their cries.

Ted Hughes, The Hawk in the Rain, Faber & Faber, 1972.