Associations with a View from the House

By Carl Rakosi 1903–2004 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.

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)

Biography

The son of German Jewish parents, Carl Rakosi was born in Berlin in 1903, moving soon to Hungary following his parents’ separation in 1904. Immigrating with his father and stepmother to Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 1910, he eventually graduated from the University of Wisconsin (where he edited the literary magazine) and later earned a master’s degree in social work from the University of Pennsylvania. Rakosi’s involvement in the . . .

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