Associations with a View from the House
By Carl Rakosi
What can be compared to
the living eye?
Its East
is flowering
honeysuckle
and its North
dogwood bushes.
What can be compared
to light
in which leaves darken
after rain,
fierce green?
like Rousseau’s jungle:
any minute
the tiger head
will poke through
the foliage
peering
at experience.
Who is like man
sitting in the cell
of referents,
whose eye
has never seen
a jungle,
yet looks in?
It is the great eye,
source of security.
Praised be thou,
as the Jews say,
who have engraved
clarity
and delivered us
to the mind
where you must reign
severe
as quiddity of bone
forever
and ever without
bias or mercy,
attrition or mystery.
Copyright Credit: Carl Rakosi, “Associations with a View from the House” from The Collected Poems of Carl Rakosi (Orono: The National Poetry Foundation, 1986). Used with the permission of Marilyn J. Kane.
Source: The Collected Poems of Carl Rakosi (National Poetry Foundation, 1986)