The Cliff-Jumping Club
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So you see, the Fool comes up every time
I lay down the cards, motley boy
eyes downturned, with the little dog
nipping at his heels as he steps off
the cliff. Charlotte looks at me slyly:
I can see you've had a sordid life.
Shut up and read, I say and she does,
The empress is your feminine, you've
got to bring those energies to the fore,
but I don't believe; it's too late
and Charlotte seems wasted a lot, spreading
the cards against the stained nap
glistening like the pelt of a sick animal,
and I can barely keep my eyes open
to hear the next turn of fate. It's
always late, an hour I was already
in bed as a child, the first dream
of falling jerking me awake. Not always
a dream, sometimes for real, I jumped
in abandoned construction sites on hills
scraped out in little box cliffs destined
to be garages someday with heaps
of mica dirt glinting at the bottom
while contractors waited for money
to continue. You were nothing each time
you jumped. And then you landed
and reconstituted. Amazing
how little it hurt. How easy it was
to bear, the thud of muscles jammed into earth,
joints bent tight, and then standing slowly,
and smiling because you'd done it again,
passed through nothingness, through the pitch
and yaw of an instant, hung in space.
Not always alone. With others
sometimes, children in the neighborhood,
but it was Billy Morales who followed us
to the cliff, blinking slightly in the
strong light, dark-skinned, broken English.
He couldn't even walk safely through
our neighborhood, let alone join
our club, and if you can't walk
you have to run. I don't remember
who said he had to run. It was like a voice-
over scrolling under a scene.
If I had known the way angels fall
from heaven like whistling lumps of lead
sizzling into flame I would have
recognized that opaque body––
You have to run, Billy, you have to run––
hurling himself headlong.
I think he knew,
before his body entered air,
no matter what, he'd never join the club.

Sometimes my whole childhood bears down
on that cliff, as though running towards
regions of sorrow, the way the grass runs
like green wildfire down the slope
of the bulldozed chaparral and
just for that week lupine and mustard
flare up urgent as the voice of
the minister, he's above me, reciting
the Song of Solomon, chest heaving,
face gone patchy red, because
everything wants to declare itself and
die, does it? Only I never said
a word, could have been mute, already
at the bottom of the mica heap
watching that moment, his legs
pumping forward, driving him over
the edge, hanging out in space before he
began the arc of descent, running on
air. We have to see, my mother used to say,
the meaning of our mistakes. Like
there's some code of symmetry there,
error with its dialectic. I was falling
on land in my own space, falling away,
while the sun shone through Billy,
fine gold needles piercing from the dark
center. The air took him, even though
he raised himself on one arm and rolled
his bruise-dark eyes; it was clear
he had treaded into nothingness.
What would it have been like to be the first one
to have kissed Billy, turning to fit my mouth
against those chambers of air that just opened
and took him somewhere like the wind from the East
when the sky is shut very tight
and some screaming comes into my head,
the high scream that could be radio waves
or the heat's vibration, or what there is
when nothing is, the form it takes of singing
when all the hatches are shut tight
and the dogs bark
and Charlotte has to prop her head up
with her hand, even the pop of her gum
exhausted as she turns up the card
and the little dog shrieks all over
again while the boy goes off the edge.