from "Literary Matters," A Poem by A. F. Moritz: "High Windows"

High Windows

This is the job
that finally
they gave me:
in spring, in autumn
to sweep up the bodies
of finches
around the bases
of the crystal-windowed
towers.

When I used to sleep
on the streets,
it was similar: one of us
died, the body
would be picked up
but as long as we lived,
never.

It was as though
there were someone somewhere
who said: Let them live.
Let them be
always. Let them
alone. Let us have them
with us
as they are
forever.

So strange it was,
and seemed, at first:
one of us disappeared,
no trace, or just
the filthy crumpled
bag of stuff
left in a corner,
but where was she?—until
it ceased to appear,
so often it happened,
a wonder.

Seasonal work,
a job for a while,
to search the long planters
and bases of the walls for birds
who break against windows
in the times of migration:
unable to see
the hardness in the shining
image of the new
more perfect world’s
openness.

In the future there are people
who will have to imagine
what world these
words of mine
are living in—imagine it
from their day
in which there is no longer
the knowledge of what
were towers.

A. F. Moritz's The Sparrow: Selected Poems appeared in April 2019. A Canadian poet, he has won the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Award in Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Ingram Merrill Fellowship. His poems have appeared in Hudson Review, The Paris Review, Partisan Review, and several issues of the Best American Poetry anthology series. He is Blake C. Goldring Professor of the Arts and Society at the University of Toronto, Victoria College. 

A  question for the author: why the allusion to Philip Larkin?  

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Comments

[Daniel Westover]

I think the Larkin allusion may come from these lines: "He / And his lot will all go down the long slide / Like free bloody birds." Larkin's poem, of course, is in part about how the elderly are marginalized, "pushed to one side / Like an outdated combine harvester." Something similar happens with the homeless in this poem. The lines I quoted from Larkin are about how we look with envy on the younger generation, who are free of some of the social codes and restrictions that governed us in yesteryear, but for some even making it to old age is a miracle; here, the birds going down the slide are made literal, not a representation of freedom or a "perfect world's / openness," but rather the hard fact of bodies sacrificed to indifference. I'm not articulating this very well, but I definitely see a connection. Larkin's poem ends with an image of transcendence, windows that lead onto "the deep blue air, that shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless." But here that transcendence, I think, is a kind of fool's gold, or at least something only reserved for the privileged. ("Crystal-windowed / towers" are not so different from ivory towers, or even a Trump Tower, I would say.)