The Absent Mask

Somewhere tonight the lanterns will awaken

and spill their amber secrets on the floor;

a thousand mirrors, dutiful and shaken,

will learn again what mirrors learned before—

that silk may lie, and velvet may persuade,

and every face grows braver in brocade.

The music will begin as music does:

not boldly, but with courteous intent—

a violin remembering what was

and what the candlelight was almost meant.

Then laughter, like a ribbon in the air,

will bind the room to pleasure and to prayer.

I know the house. I know the measured stair,

the patient walls that listen without speech,

the quiet portraits watching from their frames

with that old courtesy no guests can reach.

And somewhere there—though scarcely worth the telling—

a place once waited for my brief compelling.

An envelope had travelled through the day

and rested where the evening light could fall;

its wax was warm with promises of play,

its script a gentle summons to the ball.

It asked so little—merely that one appear

among the masks that make a year a year.

Yet invitations are delicate things.

They drift like petals on uncertain air;

a word may bruise the symmetry they bring,

a silence rearrange the host’s affair.

And somewhere in the corridors of breath

a whisper chose to practice its soft death.

It moved politely—rumors often do—

not loud enough to quarrel with the truth,

but subtle as a perfume passing through

the older rooms that guard society’s youth.

No witness raised a hand to halt its flight;

no shadow dared insist upon the light.

Thus doors remain precisely as they were:

well-hinged, well-polished, faultless to the sight.

No sentinel denies the traveller;

no sign proclaims the traveler’s exile tonight.

Yet still a curious distance comes to be—

a step too far between the room and me.

Inside, the dancers will invent their grace,

each partner orbiting a borrowed star;

and masks will lend a second, kinder face

to those who seldom know quite what they are.

How tenderly a ballroom can pretend

that every guest was always meant to blend.

Perhaps it is as well I do not go.

The night has many truths it cannot keep;

and chandeliers, however bright they glow,

prefer their revelations half asleep.

A mask, once lifted in the wrong design,

may leave the room more naked than divine.

Outside, the air grows honest with the cold.

The pavement keeps a simpler sort of vow;

the moon requires no costume made of gold

to know precisely who is walking now.

It shines alike on marble and on stone,

and never asks a stranger to atone.

There is a strange instruction in the street.

One learns how large a silence may become,

how absence gathers weight beneath the feet,

how far a man may wander from a room

before he understands that what was lost

was never truly counted in the cost.

Scholars have said—so elegantly said—

that exile sharpens memory like a blade;

that distance lends the vanished hours a thread

of gold no nearer moment ever made.

They praise the traveler’s solitary art

of carrying a homeland in the heart.

Yet those who praise it speak from safer lands.

They have not heard the quieter refrain

that rises when the door escapes one’s hands

and will not quite be opened once again.

For exile is not thunder, nor decree—

but merely finding where one used to be.

And so tonight the lanterns will grow bright;

the violins will lean into their theme;

the mirrors will applaud the gilded light

and faithfully repeat the evening’s dream.

Somewhere within that patient masquerade

a thousand fleeting kingdoms will be made.

But here, beneath a less adorned sky,

a single figure walks without a mask.

The wind inquires nothing of the why;

the stars consider neither blame nor task.

And in that quiet jurisdiction, free,

the night keeps one small chair of honesty.

Perhaps that is sufficient for the hour:

a road, a breath, a silence without guile.

For every ballroom celebrates its power—

yet every garden waits a little while.

And somewhere past the hedges and the wall

a man learns how to miss a masked ball.