The Mask
By Bruce Isaacson
Today, I took off my mask and my face was in it.
My name was there too and behind both
a bad smell. Behind, all gears and pulleys and meat—
no purpose, no gentle roundness of things,
no great future of bravery or brotherhood.
It was edges and emptiness,
edges that slice, emptiness to fall in,
where future and past are forgotten
where identity’s just idolatry—
a life support system for a stomach.
Today, I took off my mask and my face was in it.
Behind I could see the obverse of television
re-runs of Gilligan’s Island, a commercial with
horses dancing majestically about beer.
Bob Dole’s pills for better erections.
I was searching for the time
my mother made milk toast
with butter and sugar and 6 yr. old me squealed in delight.
It had never been on television
and was lost in favor of
memories made by a writing team
memories that had never happened.
Still, comforting, it was, all that empty belief,
like drifting off to sleep before surgery.
Collage/Bruce Isaacson. Christ of Saint John of the Christ/Salvador Dali.
Today, I took off my mask and inside it
was the city of Byzantium, reeling
from the Justinian Plague
saints literally dying with belief.
El Greco’s Christ outlined by black hole,
plaintiff eyes to the sky.
Even Dali’s Christ of Saint John flying—
and where does He have to fly to?
Is He leaving the fallen or the faithful?
He’s tired of having been a man.
Next time, he’s coming back as
a dog. A dog you can see through.
Loyal, but hard to find.
Today, I took off my mask, set it down, and my face
was on the kitchen table looking back at me,
rolling back and forth with the wind blowing in from the window.
I saw my face as ventriloquist’s dummy—
a doll, a surface, unalive,
a figurine painted on a melon.
The eyes glassy like marbles
the lips spread just enough in mock smile.
I watched the face roll back and forth in the wind
when one eye winked.
Today, I took off my mask and gazed to the heavens
at clouds rolling over the land
passing like some temporary truth.
Will I always feel this way? Today, I sat
in my room gazing out the window at sky.
There is no greater banality than this.
There is no greater miracle than this.
Today, I took off my mask and out spilled hope,
glowing, like a batch of hot tacks on a table.
They hit the table and started to cool.
Will I always feel
this way? Will I?
Always and never and
always.
Collage/Bruce Isaacson.
This poem was inspired loosely by a line from Kenneth Patchen’s Journal of Albion Moonlight, the great book-length surrealist prose poem written during WWII. So it has precedent and roots in another era of strife, an era when artists, writers, and idealists of many types felt alienated from the tragic turn of human events.
I think all of us feel alienated, to a greater or lesser degree, from the mechanized workings of the society that surrounds us. We feel that the machinery of commercial structure places personal demands that in many ways conflict with our dignity, rights, sense of peace, and even sanity. We feel that the machinery of economics, culture, media, medicine, etc. are at odds with that which is best and most human inside us. Loyalty, open heartedness, love. We each find our position within society tenuous, that we’re precariously perched, and see the social machinery operating in its predatory mode. This common experience has been expanding in power perhaps since the Romantic movement of the early 1800s, since the rise of industrial society. Today, it fuels not only art, but supports friction in politics, mental health, law, and more. The name I think of for this common experience is alienation. It exists both in forces external to us and in our own beliefs, sentiments, and desires from within. It makes a sense of pain and ambivalence complicit with our sense of belief and achievement and worth.
Art is an important way to understand the world. Salvador Dali’s Christ, mentioned in the poem and which I collaged to accompany the forthcoming book, expresses the vertigo of belief in modern life. It is set, in contrast, to some really beautiful images available in the canyons and desert flowers of spring 2020. This is one way of expressing the range of human aspiration, belief, and failure vis-à-vis the natural world.
I hope the poem expresses modern alienation from the pandemic era in a way that is both concrete and sensate. The predatory elements of society don’t just encompass us, they inhabit us. They exist perhaps most powerfully in the ways we see ourselves, in that element of the mind that sits outside ourselves and watches, as we move through the ladders of living. The poem is not a social cause or a program or solution. It is an expression of how it feels to be human. How it looks from outside our selves. And inside, how it hurts.
Photo/Ed Fuentes.
Bruce Isaacson is publisher of Zeitgeist Press, with over 100 titles to date. He earned degrees at Claremont McKenna, Dartmouth, and Brooklyn College where he submitted a thesis to noted American poet Allen Ginsberg. He was the inaugural Poet Laureate of Clark County, Nevada.
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