Mask-maker

THE MASK-MAKER

for Marcel Marceau

And so you shaped, in shared imagination,
A poem in movement's mute articulation,
A man constructing masks: a clown's creation.

Your seeing fingers wove, in sightless air,
Two masks from nothing: pathos frowned with care,
And empty bathos with a smiling stare.

The white mask-maker tried on his inventions,
Concealing neutral feeling with pretensions
Of joy and sadness: thespian conventions.

Until in frantic play he oscillated,
Imbalanced now between the near-related,
Set masks of feeling that he had created.......

When suddenly the comic, false grimace,
The static smile, ossified onto his face,
Refusing to be budged: a rigid grace.

And terrified with this: the resisting lie,
He struggled to snap its subtle and obsessive tie,
For freedom once again to weep, to cry.

Why don't we weep with his absurdity?
The unsuspecting audience laughed to see
The pathos of our needless, comic tragedy.