Contentment

I would like to paint you, but
I am not such a fool to think I could capture you
in oil and pigment.

You are too alive for that,
too full of mercurial movement and flux,
to be imprisoned by brush and canvas.

And so I am content
to watch your landscape change like seasons
in the moments we are together.

About this poem

In his novel “Portrait of a Lady”, Henry James describes the central character’s beauty as something that could not be captured because it was her liveliness that held the beauty, not a mere collection of lines and features.

I get it,

Tom