Javier Cabrera-Perez

Tus ojos, tus ojos, you said.

your eyes, I said,
are like forests—
the irises are sunflowers
and behind them
tiny villages spread.

what do the villagers do? you asked.

In the villages,
tired old men wait
for their wives to come home.
The men
in your villages compose poems
about two amber planets
they see across the sky
and research methods
on how to travel space.

Their houses, trains
and waiting rooms
are layered on hills
and spilled like heartbeats
across the valley—
sleeping, moving, waiting.

They discover things about the void
between us—
for example: “supernovas
are a good source of elements
heavier than oxygen.”

A renowned scientist among them
postulates cautious theories:
“shooting stars are beautiful,
and rare, much like molecules
of water in the plains of Arizona.”

There are launch pads
in every street—
bottle rockets with poems
are sent upwards. They say

“I love you like the sun
rising over the grapevines”
“I love you like a forgotten
train, rumbling back into a station”
but the rockets fall short,
and the poems spiral down
through the atmosphere, burning.

They have found, in their studies,
that from my side of the stars
                                                to yours
Travel is limited by time
much more than space:
In my galaxies, in order to love you
I must give up the oxygen that I
consume (and leave, exhaling
as a divagating supernova)