rápida agonia

He loved her and she loved him.

His kisses sucked out her whole past and future or tried to

He had no other appetite

She bit him she gnawed him she sucked

She wanted him complete inside her

Safe and sure forever and ever

Their little cries fluttered into the curtains

Her eyes wanted nothing to get away

Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists his elbows

He gripped her hard so that life

Should not drag her from that moment

He wanted all future to cease

He wanted to topple with his arms round her

Off that moment's brink and into nothing

Or everlasting or whatever there was

Her embrace was an immense press

To print him into her bones

His smiles were the garrets of a fairy palace

Where the real world would never come

Her smiles were spider bites

So he would lie still till she felt hungry

His words were occupying armies

Her laughs were an assassin's attempts

His looks were bullets daggers of revenge

His glances were ghosts in the corner with horrible secrets

His whispers were whips and jackboots

Her kisses were lawyers steadily writing

His caresses were the last hooks of a castaway

Her love-tricks were the grinding of locks

And their deep cries crawled over the floors

Like an animal dragging a great trap

His promises were the surgeon's gag

Her promises took the top off his skull

She would get a brooch made of it

His vows pulled out all her sinews

He showed her how to make a love-knot

Her vows put his eyes in formalin

At the back of her secret drawer

Their screams stuck in the wall

Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves

Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop

In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs

In their dreams their brains took each other hostage

In the morning they wore each other's face

Lovesong in Wodwo (1967) 

Your moon was full of women.

Your moon-mother there, over your bed.

The Tyrolean, the guttural,

Mourning and remaking herself.

It was always Monday in her mind.

Prouty was there, tender and buoyant moon,

Whose wand of beams so dainty

Put the costly sparkle

Into Cinderella. Beutscher

Moon of dismemberment and resurrection

Who found enough parts on the floor of her shop

To fill your old skin and get you walking

Into Tuesday. Mary Ellen Chase,

Silver nimbus lit, egg eyes hooded,

The moon-owl who found you

Even in England, and plucked you out of my nest

And carried you back to collage,

Dragging you all the way, your toes trailing

In the Atlantic.

Phases

Of your dismal-headed

Fairy godmother moon. Mother

Making you dance with her magnetic eye

On your daddy's coffin

(There in the family film). Prouty

Wafting you to the ballroom of broken glass

On bleeding feet. Beutscher

Twanging the puppet strings

That waltzed you in air out of your mythical grave

To jig with your Daddy's bones on a kind of tightrope

Over the gap of your real grave.

Mary Ellen Moon of Massachusetts

Struck you with her chiming claw

And turned you into an hourglass of moonlight

With its menstrual wound

Of shadow sand. She propped you,

On her lectern,

Lecture-timer.

White-faced bolts

Of electrocuting moonlight-

Masks of the full or over-full or empty

Moon that tipped your heart

Upside down and drained it. As you flew

They jammed all your wavelengths

With their criss-cross instructions,

Crackling and dragging their blacks

Over your failing flight,

Hauling your head this way and that way

As you clung to the sun - to the last

Shred of the exploded dawn

In your fist-

That Monday.

Night-Ride on Ariel in Birthday Letters (1998)

Ted Hughes (1930 - 1998)