Apartment, apartness: Pickering lets one word crack open to reveal another. In the first stanza the speaker, hemmed in by "apartment houses," has been "rendered" an "apartness," a coined noun that makes isolation sound like a condition the buildings have manufactured. The metaphor that follows is a crossword. The speaker can find "no clues" to "fill in kinship / down, or across, their windows," so the facing windows become a grid of blank squares and the neighbours an unsolved puzzle. The title plays on the same idea. A "flat" is a home, but "flat" can also mean level, dull or without tone, and "farewell" hints that the poem is taking leave of something, though the text never says exactly what.
The poem then turns to the natural world, but it will not keep nature and architecture apart. The woods "ruffl[e] breastfeathers," then become a "flickering fur of alder leaves," so the trees are bird and animal at once. The birches form a "frieze," a word from buildings and temples, and the shadows or reflections they cast are "lapping the yellow wall" like water. Wherever the speaker looks, one category leaks into another, and the poem seems to be searching for a language in which the built and the grown can share a view.
Sound is a quiet obsession. The sky is a "whited-out bell," and a "round tung" (the spelling is the poem's own) "deafens / the eye with a puff of air." Since a bell has a tongue, I read this as a pale, muffled sun or a silent clapper, though the poem leaves it open. Either way, the senses are crossed: an eye is deafened. The fourth stanza deepens the effect with "islands of silence / in the watery roar" and "drops of burnt voice." The wind becomes a sea, and human voices fall out of it scorched and liquid at once. The image is strange, but it suits a place where people live close together and rarely connect.
The middle of the poem turns to change. Over "our years" a "heathland of waste / was heaped with gouged earth," and the fifth stanza stumbles forward in fragments: "Erasing the school's red roof / From sight; grazing // the cathedral tower." The sentence has no main verb, and the capital "From" in mid-sentence feels like a flaw in the surface. The syntax seems to copy the thing it describes, a skyline being built up piece by piece. "Reviewing / the observatory" puns on looking again and seeing again, and the line break itself hints at a second view. What remains visible is described in the vocabulary of fashion and shopping: a "badged belt" where "accessories deck the horizon," echoing the earlier "trinkets." The horizon has become something worn.
The poem has no end rhyme and no fixed metre. Its lines are short and uneven, packed with stressed syllables ("grey as pencil," "whited-out bell"), and it holds together through sound instead: the echo of "apartment" in "apartness," the f-sounds of "flickering fur," the dense consonants of "gouged earth." Enjambment pushes sentences across stanza breaks, so the verse feels as hemmed in and as restless as the view.
The last stanza gathers the numbers. "Twice seven years from the seventh floor" suggests a long, patient watch, with the 7s repeating like a ritual. The speaker has seen "white ships glide over the trees" and calls the flat an "oratory," a small place of prayer. The room becomes a chapel for looking. The pronouns shift too. The poem begins with "us" and then isolates "me," but the horizon is "our" horizon, and the shared word hints at a kinship the windows could not supply. The closing claim, that this horizon "will commemorate me," is double-edged. It could be consoling or bleak, and the poem does not choose between them.
The poem is significant because it avoids the easy complaint against modern housing. It records loss, in the vanished roof and the grazed tower, but it also shows attachment, since the speaker's life has been measured against this changing skyline until the two cannot be separated. It is a quiet poem about how a person can belong to a view even when they cannot belong to a neighbourhood.