At the Window Caleb Braun

At the Window

Death makes even us all, makes beauty from the finite window through which rests the seemingly innocent sky.

Each bound by body, wake to rooms like this one: wishing the window a bit bigger, only the tops of west desert trees

visible: mesquite, Texas ash, scrub oak, the loneliness of landscape whose otherness is (if only it weren’t so) ourselves.

All that echoes here is here. Estrangement is the occasion. As if suddenly it was my birthday

and those clouds gathered at the edge of the windowless horizon weren’t the precipitants of a summer storm

but balloons brought exactly for me by strangers whose deaths are forgotten, whose stone eyes weigh nothing,

whose bones rise like prophecy and dance in the pregnancy of the pale-blue, human afternoon.

Franklin Mountains, El Paso By Daniel Combs