None gladden my heart as much as thee

    None gladden my heart as much as thee, my love
My fate is interwoven with thine
We are but two orphans in a strange land
Born of moon mothers
And sired by the sun
Angels of fire are we, delivered turbulently
Clinging to the thrashing tail of a molten comet
Foretelling the New Jerusalem

With every imperfection I love thee more
Mine when I failed to ask the vital question,
A miserable Parsifal was I,
And thine when you killed me
A thousand times
Not knowing if I was friend or foe
One moment your demon lover
The next simply a demon alone

Every sword in my heart brings such suffering
Until now all suffering becomes sweetness
And I suffer no more
Thy merciful knife releases my blood from bondage
Love into pain, and pain into love
We dance before the serpent of light
My sweet assassin, you have such a fragrant allure
Hooded you come to return me to the sun

None gladden my heart as much as thee, my love
I forgive you your every contradiction
And I would do well to forgive myself 
My own feebleness and foolish bewilderment
I mistook the horizontal for the vertical
An easy mistake to make
All that deft clambering, that heroic ascent
Was unnecessary… the castle gate was open!

Just who dost thou be, my love?
In my dreams thou art an emanation of Mary
In the forest thee be elven, a woodland nymph
In the temple thou art my priestess
On the island my Calypso
In Christ thou art my child
And in spirit my sister
Just who dost thou be? All this, thy perfect mystery!

In time and space my lover of old
My past-life friend; my dissolution and my ruin
Though I am dismembered from head to toe
Cast-out; exiled; some way short of the promised land
I keep an altar for thee
A rose upon black wood
Thou art my initiator, my teacher in heaven
Nervous of me only in the last bastion of the physical

None gladden my heart as much as thee, my love
If thou beest near, something dissolves in my very core
And from afar I still gather nectar from thy sacred bees
If a poem is hidden in the rock, thou beest my architect
And if a song echoes forth from a subterranean spring 
Thou beest my water-diviner
Thy beseeching eyes are the arrows of love
I felt them pierce my breast even at the moment of my execution