O perfect love, unhoped-for, past despair! <br />I had not thought to find <br />Your face betwixt the terrene earth and air: <br />But deemed you lost in fabulous old lands <br />And rose-lit years to darkness long resigned. <br />O child, you cannot know <br />What magic and what miracles you bring <br />Within your tender hands; <br />What griefs are lulled to blissful slumbering, <br />Cushioned upon your deep and fragrant hair; <br />What gall-black bitterness of long ago, <br />Within my bosom sealed, <br />Ebbs gradually as might some desert well <br />Under your beauty's heaven, warm and fair, <br />And the green suns of your vertumnal eyes. <br /> <br />O beauty wrought of rapture and surprise, <br />Too dear for heart to know, or tongue to tell! <br />Now more and more you seem <br />Fantasy turned to flesh, incarnate dream. <br />Surely I called you with consummate spell <br />In desperate, forgotten wizardries, <br />With signs and sigils of dead goeties, <br />And evocations born of blood and pain <br />But deemed for ever vain. <br />Surely you came to me of yore, among <br />The teeming specters amorous <br />With faces veiled and splendid bosoms bare <br />That turned my sleep to fever and delight <br />In ever-desolate years when love was young. <br />Or I, perchance, <br />Begot you on some golden succubus <br />Amid the madness of the Sabbat's night <br />In earlier lives forevowed to Satanry <br />And sorcerous dark romance. <br />For all your heart and flesh are sib to me, <br />And in my soul's profound <br />Your face, an irrecoverable pearl, <br />Is ultimately drowned. <br />So thus, delicious girl! <br />Whether love's destiny be weal or woe, <br />I hold you now, and shall not let you go.<br /><br />Clark Ashton Smith<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/wizard-s-love/
