Her and him

It had seemed, at first,
through the passage of the early days
like a circling round -
her gravitation to him
his to her

A curving round through time,
each never quite knowing,
never quite touching
soul-to-soul -
each hoping -
in a kind of helix doubled

Did he start to wonder?
Did she?
Who first?
But, so, they felt no prompt
They felt no pull
And the lines became parallel,
no risk of touching soul-to-soul -
just two circles of self
circling on
through a desert of time

And the lines began to kink
The line of him and the line of her
to snake, to veer,
and the trundling carriage
buckled at the axis
of what they thought they had

each is a single wheel Now
on single lines that bend and lean
ever more apart, that can carry
nothing more than them alone -
going nowhere -
each wondering
who they were
and where they went