Carl Rakosi

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.

1 Under this Luxemburg of heaven, upright capstan, small eagles. . . . is the port of N.Y. . . . . gilders, stampers, pen makers, goldbeaters, apprehensions of thunder speed the whore indifference son glioma Tammany, McCoy, the bonze doors of the Guarantee Trust, the copper spandrels. Orangerie and game room with Old English tall twisted stem engraved goblets and Royal Copenhagen porcelain. A mutton fat jade Chien Lung bowl a toilet bottle amethyst stopper & monogram shield. A technical display. You bought a perfume bottle and a Chinese shawl. Susannah set a headstone in St. Paul. I’m inside waiting for a surprise I’m in love with the girl on the Wabash I’m alone with a hand in my hand and a pair of wonderful eyes but I’m blue I have to speak I want to do I want to see the sights obscure me the facts secure me The Maine sails out to sea the undertaker drives to Hartford Yesterday the ducks flew in a mackerel sky. I had the allotropes of vision, something historical at the controls of North America, heavyweight and metaphorical. What are the facts? they swept the city hall today they set the lathe dogs trimmed the tool posts scraped the bearings shellacked the knots, they set the capital upon the shaft. Somebody has to drive the spikes pitch the gears oil the cams somebody has to kill the whisky somebody has to speak What are the facts? 2 Inland is the goat in open field. The milk is marketed. Attend our table. The sand and fluorspar and the soda ash make a blue aventurine glass for this city, a lion rampant on his hind feet, royally clawing, tail whipped up. 3 come, great city, give us that old-time vaudeville ”During the water-movement of the French horns and the lovelace of a violin a wire from my girl, `I love you but I need a deposit.‘ Even the ventriloquist’s dummy laughed after we combed his pretty red hair and set him on his tricycle.“ Do you know the story of Sal? She was a lonely little gal with the lovelight in her eyes and Mr. H. H. at the ivories and she was happy (honest to God) In the season of Romain effects and synthetic American lights she drove into a California suburb in a high-compression gull-line Suiza rolling her Klieg eyes like revolving doors whereupon the jackass full of animal gas floated blissfully into the dance of the seven veils, yakking, ‘I have that funny feeling again, it must be love.’ Commentary: nothing so marks the copulative man as a corkscrew and a bottle opener. Question: Could you stand an old man to a cup of coffee? It’s hard walking with this silver plate in my head. Come, great city, you have full powers of attorney to protect your friends. 4 Immigrants from Warsaw move into a furnished room close to the stores under St. Chrysostom’s carillon with a porcelain pitcher and bath and hand towels on the bed rails. A new sign appears in the ground-floor window: Smocking, Hemstitching, Rhinestone Setting Our hour from here a loggia above the pepper trees a tiny cascade and vines above the bath house men and women driving on the fairway, laughing surrounded by Galloway pottery, garden furniture and white daisies. 5 When the light sprang from the sea, blowing, the window sintered and blew like Venus revealing my tenderness and many minds the way a night shot discovers a beast drinking and my responsibilities eating me as dogs eat gizzard. I saw the city changed set up like laboratory glassware, amines of herring brine, the malic acid of the sea buckthorn, glass-enclosed prescription balance, steel and agate, Fabrik Koln a physics clear as alcohol, La Vita Nuova, I hardly knew. Creditors dined at the Cliquot Club, they read the papers, trade changed. Their horses died, the big-bellied; their dogs slept in the steam heat. An ambulance with modest glass doors and a silver cross keeps night watch: A surgeon. Delicate nickel-plated instruments are laid on trays. Illuminated on the operating table naked glassblowers, gunsmiths, barbers, clerks, importers, old men from hotels, pink and tailored, naphtha-smelling Irish priests, cravat-and-boy face of the movie usher, Frankel, Shmulik, Old Country watchmakers then a white horse in the park, cigars and politics. The city wrapped in cellophane, an act-born eggshape twisted like Ugolino one sea-water, one circulatory system of man observing his magnificent urea.

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.