PARTISAN REVIEW
Prodigal child of dearth's impoverishing;
Offspring of mortality,
Sun-seed and moon-seed, grasping land and sea
In the closed fist, waking from that great tree
Patterned with every fantasy,
Rooted in earth and flowering in the
stars,
A demon and a god circling the vase
Of sacred exequy;
And waking still
Out of the rivers of lost light that fill
The martyrs' garden from the saints' white hill,
Wa.king from deepest burial of the drowned,
And last, from light, the Father, feared, unknown,
This
fourfold sleep cast up on barren ground
A shadow's master to full stature grown.
God
rose from
this,
Shook once
the
hewn foundations of the world,
Earthquakes, volcanoes, and the bell-like sea,
His marl-made Adam into chaos hurled,
Left grief a mammoth on the spiny scree;
Tied millstones round the neck of avarice,
Filled famine's baskets seven and twelve times full,
Rose from the broken bread,
The consecrated chalice,
Rose from behind the eyes,
Word of all words,
One voice of
all
the dead,
Macle for the false dove-sellers and scale-lovers a scourge
of little cords,
Made the false temples true
And scattered the remembered lies,
Made man aware of
his
own loneliness,
The prepared logic of
his
enemies.
He in Job's vision threw
Fixed thought into a moving wilderness;
In terror's heart, too terrible for fear,
He built upon the spiral ear,
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