Breakfast with the Sister in law

What if there were no, ‘other’?

She says as if finding the words

Swirling in her latte

You look in your cup

but find no letters,

Or too many,

it can be difficult to tell,

What is foam and what is thousands

Of unfinished thoughts

frothed together,

And clouding out the area

where the coffee

Meets the lip

You could begin,

As long as we both sit here together

Looking across the table,

The desk,

The counter

The bridge-

And before that

The river,

The fence

The field

The trench-

And of course before that

The forest

The dance

The hunt

The fire-

Across lives

Across time

Across all matter

and even matters

For that matter

light and dark

‘hmmm’

You let out

Instead

And pick up the teaspoon

As to tether yourself here

While the cosmos is about to

Rip itself open and swallow

Yourself whole,

Before you even have time

To start on your eggs-

And you were really looking

Forward to the eggs

So, here comes the waitress now

Because of course-

Big questions get asked

Over small tables

In these quiet ways

And in these quiet exchanges

Is where you find them,

Most perfectly explained-

The other, sitting across

The table from you

Putting together words

In an order that would never form

In your mouth

Much less,

Make their way trippingly out

As the other seems to manage,

As a proof of their existence

You can see it all now,

It lies there, comfortably

In the nook between the

Soft and the carless sincerity

of the proposal.

There, snuggled in, is the ease

With which the other

Laces their fingers with their lover

Or mentions them offhandedly

To the colleague

The driver,

The doctor

There you see the other

In the morning at the mirror

Making up their face

In a way that will not need

To split itself again

And again

And again

Depending on who they meet

Or where they are going

Or if they can afford

To miss out on this job,

This house

This party

This education

This friend

This next of kin.

And how could they?

Of course alterity, unlike gravity

Could be a conspiracy and

Not a fundamental,

Something accidental

That could happen or not happen on a whim

Because time and time again

You are the one

Written and

Staged and

Played and

Sung and

Danced and

Painted and

Sculpted and

Tongued as

The other across the table

Not the one looking,

As aloud they ponder,

What if there were no, ‘other’?


So here we sit, the subject and you

But before any of this could be drawn

Out over the wood,

Over its veins

That have accompanied

Hundreds of years

Of conversations like these

the waitress took up your

cup before you could

quite finish drinking—

And now your words

Have to reveal themselves

Taking on new shapes

In different spaces

As the wood is wiped

For the next pair

To take their places,

Seated across from each other

At the table

with chairs enough for

One

and

An-other