He Stood

He stamped his feet and opened the door, stood on the threshold, turned around. The desert light shrank his eyes, sun slammed his face--he almost lost his breath--blond shiny grasses, ring of distant mountains pinking in the haze, the scorched but somehow fertile earth--he wiped his brow--he couldn't go in, he couldn't move, he couldn't say why--as if he too were a thing dried in sunlight, stopped in his tracks in the heat that fixed him in its gaze--rattlesnake Medusa--where he breathed the stinging dusty winds as though a rock inhaling rock--his proper evolution?--and fed on silence as it flowered and fell--the fierce clarity, the fierce restraint--front door behind him hanging open like a thrown shadow as he blazed in place... a man inside the view... the zooming arc... and edge to edge the blue absolute...

 About This Poem

"When I visit my friends south of Tucson, I say I'm going to Arizona to eat sky. I'm always amazed how much amplitude there is in the desert's minimal details. I wanted the person in this poem to be so transfixed by the view that he shifts from being a detached observer to being a part of that amplitude, a figure moving from the outside to the inside of his own frame." 

--Aaron Shurin