Carl Rakosi Biography

In what sense
I am I
a minor observer
...

"If you open the brain
from whence sprang Solomon and Aristotle
and separate the lips
in the fissure of Sylvius
...

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.
...

Am I the only one
watching
my neighbour's
frolicksome goat,
Ginger,
tied to a pecan tree?
All morning
it has been examining
an empty bushel basket
and has lifted
one leg delicately
like a circus horse
as if to roll it,
but whether to do that
or to butt it
with its small horns,
that is the question.
Not of great moment,
no signing of the Charter,
but like air music,
quickest of the elements.
Towards which I leaped!

In form
its own grace,
appearing,
as it passed
in retrospect, classical.

The real goat stayed,
imperturbable,
the body solid
as a four-square loom
and delivered me
from abstraction.
His coloring,
greyish-soft shades,
their dark and light
passing into each other
as in an antique rubbing.

I now found myself
sitting so near,
my shade,
as in the Inferno,
sensed his,
but he gave no sign
of my presence,
even when I stroked him
and my heart leaped
at the gentle fleece,
too fine for a hard life.
He continued nibbling
on a dry bush.

I would not have believed
unconcern
could bolster the man in me
and be so enduring.
Sic transit, not caring
whether it is recognized,
The Divine
(from another age).

He was poking
into the underbush now
and reached across my head
for the small spiny twigs.

At that the phase
changed
and a sensuous trembling
hung in the air,
as when a bee is about
to descend
on blossoming clover,
and I
felt myself being pulled
as by a line
from the invisible
other side
to enter goathood,
deeper than sight.
...

Eastern Sea, 100 fathoms,
green sand, pebbles,
broken shells.

Off Suno Saki, 60 fathoms,
gray sand, pebbles,
bubbles rising.

Plasma-bearer
and slow-
motion benthos!

The fishery vessel Ion
drops anchor here
collecting
plankton smears and fauna.

Plasma-bearer, visible
sea purge,
sponge and kelpleaf.
Halicystus the Sea Bottle

resembles emeralds
and is the largest
cell in the world.

Young sea horse
Hippocampus twenty
minutes old,

nobody has ever
seen this marine
freak blink.

It radiates on
terminal vertebra
a comb of twenty

upright spines
and curls
its rocky tail.

Saltflush lobster
bull encrusted swims

backwards from the rock.
...