Free High Windows by Philip Larkin Page A

air, that shows
    Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
     

Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel
     
     
    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.  
     

The Old Fools
     
     
    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.
     

Going, Going
     
     
    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