Concealment - April 19 2022

 

Concealment

April 19 2022

How we didn't notice

that the metaphor of camouflage

had turned real.

Now, instead of just masking our feelings

and shrouding our thoughts

we actually cover our faces in cloth;

going about our business

as if in some futuristic film,

set

on some dying planet

with thick poisonous air

we've fouled ourselves.

How behind their veils

people seem even more inscrutable,

the sense of othering

pushing us further apart.

Muffled voices

glass fogged.

Soiled masks

tossed in parking lots.

Designer masks,

because we can't resist

leaving our mark

on every blank surface,

as if to urgently declare

I'm still here

and a person in my own right.

So why am I more comfortable this way,

moving through the world

concealed,

protected

behind this thin piece of material

as if somehow I'm invisible?

A surgical mask,

with elastic straps

and accordion folds.

A sight

we would have found unsettling

before the plague

has now been normalized,

the extraordinary

become routine.

And we are all extras

in a science fiction film

that ends who knows how,

shadowy figures

passing in and out of the murk

but never coming clear.

I've hardly written about the major event of the past 2 years and counting, the Covid pandemic. And when my entry point into it became the surgical mask, I did not want to make it political. I'm tired of the politics: the right, condemning the compliant as mindless sanctimonious sheep, and the rest asserting that they're (or, more accurately, “we're”) following the science and being socially responsible. I preferred the metaphor of masking, as well as the insidious nature of the normalization of the extraordinary. Which is either a testament to our adaptability, or a wry comment on our forgetfulness.