I’ve been watching videos of teenage Russian boys
climbing ladders to the tops of radio towers,
doing chin-ups and flips on railings of skyscrapers,
dangling off cranes by only fingertips as if the world
below them was completely absent: Buddha’s meditation
inside his nothingness. Through the camera lens
mounted to their heads: visible cities, the dots of people
and muffled buzz of automobiles return to their cement-
steel colonies. The street grids below create order
as the people age closer to their destination.
These boys don’t wear gloves, don’t chalk up
their palms while Death’s waiting to swallow them
if they slip. When I lean over my apartment balcony
I want to jump. This is called High Place Phenomenon—
confusion and fear, a cognitive dissonance,
an internal cue of plunging off the edge signals the brain
to back away from the danger. But these boys blinking
on the screen eat clouds—would climb to heaven
if it existed, only to climb out of it, and out of that.