On the Face That Does Not Fade: Carterian Contrary

On the Face That Does Not Fade Painters have long chased the line of a face that could never be broken,
sculptors have carved out the marble to hold what the years would have taken,
poets have sworn to their loves in a verse that outlives the beloved,
this is why beauty is raised above time, set in bronze, set in language,
what we call lovely, we make into law, we inscribe and we harden,
beauty, we say, is the gift that endures when the flesh has departed.

But the bronze holds a face and forgets every tremor that made the face living,
and the poem preserves not the girl but the ghost that her leaving left standing,
would the bloom of the cherry undo us with joy if it hung on the branch through the winter?
would the hour of dusk make us stop in the street if the sky burned that red until morning?
no — the pulse of the beautiful lives in its leaving, the note is the silence approaching,
we don't kneel to the flower because it persists, we kneel because petals are falling,
so the marble that swears to arrest the one face has only embalmed an illusion,
and the beauty we begged to be endless was never the flame — it was always the burning.

Carterian Contrary! The Carterian Contrary is a poetic form in which a proposition is formally constructed through dactylic metre and then dismantled through anapestic metre.
In short:
First Stanza: Proposition — Six Dactylic Hexameter
Second Stanza: Destruction — Eight Anapestic Hexameter