We are adults
We are adults but she my beloved
Has always been the more adult
We fell in love as children
And when we married one of us remained awhile a child
And yet together we retained
A certain innocence
Knowing only as theory of sex for example without love
Stuff of fictions and social pathology

Now that we are adults
We see that things are not so simple
That even appearances are not so simple
The mileage on the grainy path of time
The residue of discontinuity
The marks of trauma
The incandescence of joy
The sacred routines of pleasure

For joy and love are true
As inconsolable grief is true
And time both heals and issues repeated shocks
And while it is true that number
And while it is true that form and proportion
Being outside time are true
It does not follow therefore
That appearance and the marks of time
Must be falsehood
Or that abstraction bears
The muddy hue of indeterminacy

We have suffered through illusions
And seen complexity where once was simplicity
And seen complexity and added experience to our innocence
Disillusionment is in itself not painful
But merely the discovery of prior pain prior error
We have trodden the grainy path together
And gazed beyond the flaming ramparts
We have no need of reënchantment