350
PARTISAN REVIEW
Knossos, Vienna
Are tumuli, the rust of the leaf-shaped sword.
The bulls that roared to its bare-breasted galaxy,
The starred faience of the thalassocracy
Are the stamping waltzers of a Hapsburg wedding;
The Turks sweep up in their rout
The deaf ghost weeping for its graceless Karl.
The red brain unreels into its labyrinth
The thread of blood; and the beast's betrayer dreams
Over the horned, man's corpse- a Saviour.
And he too
is
history:
The charnel of the saved, the whitening
Sepulchre of the betrayed--of man's old agony:
All that is loved and does not love, that rises
Unmoved from the last contraction of his limbs.
Mazed in that great tomb
The soul grasps its last thread; beside the cypress tree
It chooses from the springs the spring of Memory,
Cries : "I am a child of Earth and Starry Heaven,
But my race
is
of Heaven alone." But its race
is
of Earth alone.
RANDALL J ARRELL
