ii.4

COMMON PATHWAYS

BY JAVIER CABRERA PÉREZ

In our dreams I was a fool

in search of a missing fibula and you

were a failed superhero in need of

newtonian mechanics.

We met in a clandestine location,

a small bar about to close,

and discussed the possibility

of finding bones with parabolic

equations.

Kissing in the street corner

we approached each other

as spiral galaxies in eternal rotation.

our years of walking in tightropes

and creaking floorboards

fell behind, and the pain
from dislocated shoulders

(past encounters in the wrong hearts)

was dissipated by the warmth

of our bodies in your apartment

near the outskirts of Cambridge.

I wished I had been there before

to percuss your chest,

listen for breath sounds,

caress the small of your back.

You translated my babbling

(as a polyglot of my brainspeak)

through similar neuronal impulses,

common pathways for tragedy and romance.

You said, would you believe pulsars

are keeping time so well?

here is proof that some things can have a frequency,

the way souls can have frequencies,

and that maybe we are two pulsars

between extremes of dark matter

flashing at the same speed.

In the Boston museum my electrons

transferred weight between my nose

and yours, which confirmed our hypothesis

of being repellent magnetic fields,

not because of being opposites

but simply because of sharing smaller particles,

things too small for the average person

to comprehend unless delirious

or in love.

I have said to you how I wished

I could rewrite all my poems to you,

but the truth is that the most important

poems I have will always be in my dreams,

which, as we already know, you occupy

as a superhero of physics.