Aaron Shurin, THE VIEW FROM HERE

The view from here’s a novelty act, a spectral jam, an overlap: in back of me the scoured hills release the steely mist like topsoil, a peel of gray, a shadow grue… in front the aerial city lifts its box-tops to the escalating sun, a brimming pool of ore… light in flight… The view from here is stitched into my skin as if the hills were mine, the stretching air mine, the tattered plaza my staging ground and rising stage, the light my lifting eyes… How I got here: in a dream. Where I came from: a dream. How I walked and how I tore into the bread and licked the glazed pots and stitched my skin into the men who carried me in to the view I made… an overlap… a fold or two of what I knew and don’t yet know… a danzón in the square with you, you lead, I flow… How I thinned and how I grew my hair and climbed the alleyways like a fugitive mule to see the view, and how it changes in the dancing rain, prismatic rush, a thunder wheel, a splattered tear, a train of silver pools and where they flow… from here…