On your lips fills me with the sweetness
I used to feel in a soutane and surplice,
a puny boy knees welded to the altar steps,
“Introibo” the priest would say, “I will go
--to God ‘s holy altar.”
“Ad deum qui laetifiicat juventutem mecum”
“To God the Joy of my youth”
And joy came, I don’t know how,
and then darkness spackled with widening hope,
clouded by the promises of truthless people
and a bounty of specious love and praise.

When you called me joy came down again,
an incarnation of certainty and light
that driveth away the darkness,
cleanses my heart and stirs my senses
as no altar ever did. Your truth is greater,
my wife, because it is the eternity of desire--
the moment we were born to yearn for
and to seek, and finding it, treasure
as once (believing) we knew the promise,
the word made flesh.