Four lines, almost no punctuation, and "Alterity" still manages to move from a creed to a hat. The title is the hardest word in it. Alterity means otherness, the quality of being fundamentally different from oneself. With that in mind, the opening line, "I believe in the face," sounds less like a casual remark and more like a confession of faith. "I believe in" is the language of religious creeds, but what is being trusted here is not a god. It is the human face, the part of another person we meet first and understand least. Philosophers such as Emmanuel Levinas made the face central to thinking about otherness. The poem never mentions him, but the title invites the comparison.
The second line takes the idea somewhere stranger: "a miracle of change and inner child." Look at the grammar. We expect "change and" to be followed by another abstract noun, something like "permanence" or "memory." Instead we get "inner child," a phrase borrowed from everyday self-help talk and dropped in without an article. It jars, and the jolt is useful. A face is where change happens, in every expression and every added year. It is also where an earlier self refuses to leave. So otherness is not only the stranger across the table. It is also the stranger we used to be and still carry around. "Miracle" keeps the religious register going, though the tone is too offhand to be solemn.
After the stanza break comes the simile: "like a grave that's able to sing." What exactly is like a grave? The grammar doesn't say. The comparison could attach to the face, to the miracle, or to the inner child, and that ambiguity is part of the point. A grave is the most silent, closed-off object we know, so making it sing is a small resurrection, the "miracle" delivered. There is also a quiet pun. "Grave" as an adjective means serious, and a face can be grave, so the line may picture a solemn expression suddenly breaking into song. On this reading the inner child is what lies buried inside the adult face, and singing is how it gets out.
Then the last line turns comic: "under a hat and eyebrows." A hat and eyebrows make an odd pair, one a piece of clothing and the other a piece of the body. Yoking them turns the face into a landscape, with the hat as a mound or headstone and the eyebrows as tufts of grass growing over it. "Under" keeps the burial image alive, but these everyday objects bring the poem down to street level. The singing grave is someone you might pass wearing a hat. Mixing death with the ordinary keeps the poem from sounding pompous. It can say something enormous and still smile at itself.
The sound is carefully handled for something so short. There is no rhyme, and the two couplet-like stanzas rely on pattern rather than chime. The lines run roughly three beats, then four, then three, then three, so the second line sprawls just where the poem piles up its two ideas of change and childhood. Long *a* sounds echo across both stanzas in "face," "change," "grave" and "able." They tie the face to the grave without any rhyme scheme and give the poem a faint hum beneath the images. The final word, "eyebrows," ends on a light, trailing syllable rather than a hard stop, so the poem fades out instead of announcing a conclusion.
The poem is worth reading because it holds a large idea in a very small space and refuses to explain it. Its first words are "I believe," not "I know," which suits the subject. We can't fully know another person, so we can only trust that there is a self behind the face. The poem also suggests that the other is not just out there. It lives inside one face and one life, where the child, the adult and the eventual grave all share the same features. The sudden shifts of register, from creed to self-help phrase to graveyard to hat, show how odd and unreadable an ordinary face can be. The poem gives no date or setting, and it doesn't need them. Everything it wants us to see is already there, under the hat and eyebrows.