#high window

dustjackets.com

February 1943 Hamish Hamilton hardcover

third Phillip Marlowe novel

Mary Mallory / Hollywood Heights – The Cahuenga Building

Note: This is an encore post from 2012. From its days as an elegant bank building to its abandoned and forgotten existence in the 1980s and 1990s, the former Security Trust and Savings Bank at Hollywood Boulevard and Cahuenga Boulevard has served as both a local institution and location setting for films and books. Not as beautiful as the empty bank building at Hollywood and Highland Avenue, the…

High Windows

When I see a couple of kids And guess he’s **** 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Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives— Bonds and gestures pushed to one side Like an outdated combine harvester, And everyone young going down the long slide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.