In windows
Anna Prewitt
At night,
the incomprehensible pathos of stranger’s headlights
Maybe they trace the outline of your face, light the outside of stranger’s lives and maybe they
light the boundaries of your own
In the gathered, gathering darkness
each window filled with warm yellow light is another casual mystery
What if you were within and not without,
looking up, up
at the flash of a silk dress being folded
the imagined glint of viscous light on glasses behind a diaphanous curtain and
the shadow of a stretching cat beside a Tiffany lamp that could’ve been
your grandmother’s, but isn’t
How much would you have had to be otherwise in order
not to be you?
How much of life would have had to be different for that lamp to have really been your grandmother’s, for you to have danced in that silk dress last night
for this moment, here
not to exist?
You practice drawing in the glassy fog of the car window
with the tip of your finger
In the emptiness, before it mists over, the giddiness of relative motion
the soundless enchantment
of fragments of highway
In windows
there is more than glass between the light and the darkness
the incomprehensible pathos of stranger’s headlights
Maybe they trace the outline of your face, light the outside of stranger’s lives and maybe they
light the boundaries of your own
In the gathered, gathering darkness
each window filled with warm yellow light is another casual mystery
What if you were within and not without,
looking up, up
at the flash of a silk dress being folded
the imagined glint of viscous light on glasses behind a diaphanous curtain and
the shadow of a stretching cat beside a Tiffany lamp that could’ve been
your grandmother’s, but isn’t
How much would you have had to be otherwise in order
not to be you?
How much of life would have had to be different for that lamp to have really been your grandmother’s, for you to have danced in that silk dress last night
for this moment, here
not to exist?
You practice drawing in the glassy fog of the car window
with the tip of your finger
In the emptiness, before it mists over, the giddiness of relative motion
the soundless enchantment
of fragments of highway
In windows
there is more than glass between the light and the darkness
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Anna Prewitt (Pomona '24) is from a small island in Washington's San Juans, and has been enthralled with poetry and the stories it shares since composing a poem on stars for her fourth grade teacher.
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