The Same and the Other

Gina Franco

in each hand a disparate dream: in all dreams

   another far

      too quiet: delirium

                                 of the mask and God behind it: paradise

had no winter like

                          this: this

      is the one where the infant sleeps in the dirt

the sleep

of a dreamless mind so far from home

   he no longer resembles anyone:

  his mother, thrown

down, hunted, sick

with fear, sleeps next to him among the filth of animals: his father

              watches (the imperative

   that love

—not solace—

                      demands), for there is no room for another

              sleeper: the desert will keep

bringing its mirage,

no doubt:

             the child will walk in his shimmering garden, says

the wilderness, if you just get across:

                                                          motes in the light rise and rest:

             sole face left (remember you are dust)

                                                                       of our first lost image:

Gina Franco is the author of The Accidental, winner of the 2019 CantoMundo Poetry Prize and forthcoming from the University of Arkansas Press, and The Keepsake Storm (University of Arizona Press, 2004).

Themes

About this Poem

“The title of this sonnet is taken from Emmanuel Levinas’ book, Totality and Infinity (Duquesne University Press, 1969). A few pages into the book, Levinas describes selfhood as emerging through the way the self exists in the world: ‘The way of the I against the ‘other’ of the world consists in sojourning, in identifying oneself by existing here at home with oneself. In a world which is from the first other the I is nonetheless autochthonous.’ I was thinking about that word, ‘autochthonous,’ about the dream of belonging, of being ‘at home’ in the refuge of the world, even as ‘I’ move through and against it. I was thinking about how that movement is brutally restricted for those attempting to cross the border—how selfhood for a migrant person is regulated and denied; the cruelty of the border is that it enforces an uncompromising binary between the same and the other.”

—Gina Franco

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no telling what lies on the other side: the X and its door: the wayfarer arrives at the throne at the end of the world to find that the throne is a cardboard sign scrawled in black marker: (I thirst): no one, nowhere: no “look no further”: though the boy

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