The Building

Higher 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.