Twenty-eight words, no punctuation, not a single capital letter, and yet Dave Bonta's "Facelift" travels from a surgeon's knife to a shop counter. Its subject is cosmetic surgery, as the title tells us, but its real target is the thinking behind it: a view of the face as something you buy, finish and wear, and a fear of looking ordinary so strong that damage seems preferable. The title matters more than usual here. Without it, the opening lines could belong to something much grimmer.
That grimness is deliberate. "cut and make an end of it" is an order with no speaker attached. "Make an end of it" is the phrase we use for settling a quarrel or putting a stop to something unbearable, and it can shade into darker meanings. Used for a cosmetic operation, it makes the surgery sound like a verdict. What is being ended is left open: ageing, hesitation, perhaps the old face itself. Then comes "behind the ear," a small, exact anatomical detail. Judging by the title, it is where a cut can hide in the hairline. Stopping at the ear, with the stanza left hanging, also gives the phrase a quiet menace.
The middle stanza is the poem's argument, and it sounds like a proverb: "to mar is better / than to be plain." The rhythm helps. These two lines are the most regular in the poem, almost a clean alternation of weak and strong beats (to MAR is BET-ter / than to be PLAIN), and that evenness gives the claim the ring of received wisdom. The word choice is sharper still. "Mar" is a short, hard word meaning to spoil or disfigure, and it sits close to the old pairing "make or mar," which the first stanza's "make an end" seems to echo. Meanwhile "plain," a word that usually carries praise (plain speaking, plain truth), is turned into an insult. The speaker admits that the operation is a kind of damage, and says it is worth it. That admission is the unsettling part.
The last stanza brings in money, the one thing the poem has been circling. "no hat cost as much / as a face done fine" puts the face beside an accessory. Both are worn on the head, both are put on to be seen, but a hat can be taken off and a face "done fine" cannot. "Done" suggests something finished, even something cooked or exhausted, as in "done for." "Fine" means excellent, but it is also a payment, so the phrase quietly carries a price tag in its own sound. The logic is also curious. The expense is offered as proof of worth, as though a thing must be good because nothing else costs so much. Whether the speaker admires this or is dryly noting it, the poem does not say.
That withholding is part of its craft. With no punctuation and no capitals, the lines slide into one another, and the voice could belong to a surgeon, a client or a bystander. There is no true rhyme, but there is a pull of sound: "cut" and "cost" share a hard opening, "make" and "mar" share an m, and "plain" and "fine," opposites in meaning, end on the same nasal n. The effect is that the poem's opposites feel bound together. The stanzas also move steadily outward, from the body (the cut), to an aesthetic principle (better marred than plain), to economics (the cost). The knife, the rule and the price come in that order, as if each justified the one before.
What makes "Facelift" worth reading is how much it does without commentary. It never says that vanity is foolish or that surgery is wrong. It simply lets a confident, proverb-like voice speak and trusts us to hear what is off in it, such as the fact that "better to mar" is an odd thing to say about beauty. The poem is small enough to read in seconds, but the questions it leaves behind last longer. Who decides that plainness is a fault? And what does it mean to treat a face like something bought?