The Same and the Other
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:
Copyright © 2019 by Gina Franco. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 3, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
“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
Gina Franco
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).