Imprisoned Beauty

I wished I might pour out this beauty
as a song that endures... while the model perishes;
its colors dyed with the visions
of your eyes as they search out the impossible,
its melody drawn from warm evening-talk
on summer nights beside the sands,
its perfume taken from a dusky shore
where, in the flutter of the eyelids, the hanging boughs appear,
and from the swaying of the figure its rapturous meters,
and from the tread of footsteps in coquetry.

Then, if I imprison this radiance
in palaces of rhyme like bridal bowers,
what god is beyond the range of my hand,
and what star in the sky cannot be reached?!
And tomorrow poetry will have the right to walk proud:
for love is of its weaving — and fantasy!!