Wizard's Love

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