High Windows (2 page)

W
hen I see a couple of kids

And guess he’s fucking her and she’s

Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,

I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—

Bonds and gestures pushed to one side

Like an outdated combine harvester,

And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if

Anyone looked at me, forty years back,

And thought,
That’ll
be
the
life
;

No
God
any
more,
or
sweating
in
the
dark

About
hell
and
that,
or
having
to
hide

What
you
think
of
the
priest.
He

And
his
lot
will
all
go
down
the
long
slide

Like
free
bloody
birds.
And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:

The sun-comprehending glass,

And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows

Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

L
ight spreads darkly downwards from the high

Clusters of lights over empty chairs

That face each other, coloured differently.

Through open doors, the dining-room declares

A larger loneliness of knives and glass

And silence laid like carpet. A porter reads

An unsold evening paper. Hours pass,

And all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds,

Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room.

In shoeless corridors, the lights burn. How

Isolated, like a fort, it is—

The headed paper, made for writing home

(If home existed) letters of exile:
Now

Night
comes
on.
Waves
fold
behind
villages.
 

W
hat do they think has happened, the old fools,

To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose

It’s more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,

And you keep on pissing yourself, and can’t remember

Who called this morning? Or that, if they only chose,

They could alter things back to when they danced all night,

Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September?

Or do they fancy there’s really been no change,

And they’ve always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,

Or sat through days of thin continuous dreaming

Watching light move? If they don’t (and they can’t), it’s strange:

               Why aren’t they screaming?

At death, you break up: the bits that were you

Start speeding away from each other for ever

With no one to see. It’s only oblivion, true:

We had it before, but then it was going to end,

And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour

To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower

Of being here. Next time you can’t pretend

There’ll be anything else. And these are the first signs:

Not knowing how, not hearing who, the power

Of choosing gone. Their looks show that they’re for it:

Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines—

              How can they ignore it?

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms

Inside your head, and people in them, acting.

People you know, yet can’t quite name; each looms

Like a deep loss restored, from known doors turning,

Setting down a lamp, smiling from a stair, extracting

A known book from the shelves; or sometimes only

The rooms themselves, chairs and a fire burning,

The blown bush at the window, or the sun’s

Faint friendliness on the wall some lonely

Rain-ceased midsummer evening. That is where they live:

Not here and now, but where all happened once.

               This is why they give

An air of baffled absence, trying to be there

Yet being here. For the rooms grow farther, leaving

Incompetent cold, the constant wear and tear

Of taken breath, and them crouching below

Extinction’s alp, the old fools, never perceiving

How near it is. This must be what keeps them quiet:

The peak that stays in view wherever we go

For them is rising ground. Can they never tell

What is dragging them back, and how it will end? Not at night?

Not when the strangers come? Never, throughout

The whole hideous inverted childhood? Well,

                  We shall find out.

I
thought it would last my time—

The sense that, beyond the town,

There would always be fields and farms,

Where the village louts could climb

Such trees as were not cut down;

I knew there’d be false alarms

In the papers about old streets

And split-level shopping, but some

Have always been left so far;

And when the old part retreats

As the bleak high-risers come

We can always escape in the car.

Things are tougher than we are, just

As earth will always respond

However we mess it about;

Chuck filth in the sea, if you must:

The tides will be clean beyond.

—But what do I feel now? Doubt?

Or age, simply? The crowd

Is young in the Mi café;

Their kids are screaming for more—

More houses, more parking allowed,

More caravan sites, more pay.

On the Business Page, a score

Of spectacled grins approve

Some takeover bid that entails

Five per cent profit (and ten

Per cent more in the estuaries): move

Your works to the unspoilt dales

(Grey area grants)! And when

You try to get near the sea

In summer …

                   It seems, just now,

To be happening so very fast;

Despite all the land left free

For the first time I feel somehow

That it isn’t going to last,

That before I snuff it, the whole

Boiling will be bricked in

Except for the tourist parts—

First slum of Europe: a role

It won’t be so hard to win,

With a cast of crooks and tarts.

And that will be England gone,

The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,

The guildhalls, the carved choirs.

There’ll be books; it will linger on

In galleries; but all that remains

For us will be concrete and tyres.

Most things are never meant.

This won’t be, most likely: but greeds

And garbage are too thick-strewn

To be swept up now, or invent

Excuses that make them all needs.

I just think it will happen, soon.

J
an van Hogspeuw staggers to the door

And pisses at the dark. Outside, the rain

Courses in cart-ruts down the deep mud lane.

Inside, Dirk Dogstoerd pours himself some more,

And holds a cinder to his clay with tongs,

Belching out smoke. Old Prijck snores with the gale,

His skull face firelit; someone behind drinks ale,

And opens mussels, and croaks scraps of songs

Towards the ham-hung rafters about love.

Dirk deals the cards. Wet century-wide trees

Clash in surrounding starlessness above

This lamplit cave, where Jan turns back and farts,

Gobs at the grate, and hits the queen of hearts.

Rain, wind and fire! The secret, bestial peace!

H
igher than the handsomest hotel

The lucent comb shows up for miles, but see,

All round it close-ribbed streets rise and fall

Like a great sigh out of the last century.

The porters are scruffy; what keep drawing up

At the entrance are not taxis; and in the hall

As well as creepers hangs a frightening smell.

There are paperbacks, and tea at so much a cup,

Like an airport lounge, but those who tamely sit

On rows of steel chairs turning the ripped mags

Haven’t come far. More like a local bus,

These outdoor clothes and half-filled shopping bags

And faces restless and resigned, although

Every few minutes comes a kind of nurse

To fetch someone away: the rest refit

Cups back to saucers, cough, or glance below

Seats for dropped gloves or cards. Humans, caught

On ground curiously neutral, homes and names

Suddenly in abeyance; some are young,

Some old, but most at that vague age that claims

The end of choice, the last of hope; and all

Here to confess that something has gone wrong.

It must be error of a serious sort,

For see how many floors it needs, how tall

It’s grown by now, and how much money goes

In trying to correct it. See the time,

Half-past eleven on a working day,

And these picked out of it; see, as they climb 

To their appointed levels, how their eyes

Go to each other, guessing; on the way

Someone’s wheeled past, in washed-to-rags ward clothes:

They see him, too. They’re quiet. To realise

This new thing held in common makes them quiet,

For past these doors are rooms, and rooms past those,

And more rooms yet, each one further off

And harder to return from; and who knows

Which he will see, and when? For the moment, wait,

Look down at the yard. Outside seems old enough:

Red brick, lagged pipes, and someone walking by it

Out to the car park, free. Then, past the gate,

Traffic; a locked church; short terraced streets

Where kids chalk games, and girls with hair-dos fetch

Their separates from the cleaners—O world,

Your loves, your chances, are beyond the stretch

Of any hand from here! And so, unreal,

A touching dream to which we all are lulled

But wake from separately. In it, conceits

And self-protecting ignorance congeal

To carry life, collapsing only when

Called to these corridors (for now once more

The nurse beckons—). Each gets up and goes

At last. Some will be out by lunch, or four;

Others, not knowing it, have come to join

The unseen congregations whose white rows

Lie set apart above—women, men;

Old, young; crude facets of the only coin

This place accepts. All know they are going to die.

Not yet, perhaps not here, but in the end,

And somewhere like this. That is what it means,

This clean-sliced cliff; a struggle to transcend

The thought of dying, for unless its powers

Outbuild cathedrals nothing contravenes

The coming dark, though crowds each evening try

With wasteful, weak, propitiatory flowers.

J
ake Balokowsky, my biographer,

Has this page microfilmed. Sitting inside

His air-conditioned cell at Kennedy

In jeans and sneakers, he’s no call to hide

Some slight impatience with his destiny:

‘I’m stuck with this old fart at least a year;

I wanted to teach school in Tel Aviv,

But Myra’s folks’—he makes the money sign—

‘Insisted I got tenure. When there’s kids—’

He shrugs. ‘It’s stinking dead, the research line;

Just let me put this bastard on the skids,

I’ll get a couple of semesters leave

To work on Protest Theater.’ They both rise,

Make for the Coke dispenser. ‘What’s he like?

Christ, I just told you. Oh, you know the thing,

That crummy textbook stuff from Freshman Psych,

Not out for kicks or something happening—

One of those old-type
natural
fouled-up guys.’