Passport Photo

April 8 2020

In the passport photo

no smiles are allowed.

I'm surprised

I haven't also been asked

to shave-off my beard

put my glasses aside

or practice looking dead-eyed,

like a haughty runway model

with that thouand mile stare.

It seems what they want

is the Platonic version of me,

the template, stripped

of all my conceits

and precious affectations,

the essential ideal

to which I've never yet lived-up.

No human frailty

or hint of happiness.

A seasoned world traveller

who is unfailingly serene,

a model citizen

of my country of origin.

So I look sternly formal.

Like those painfully posed photos

from long ago

when exposures were long,

and pictures were taken

only on special occasions

in a borrowed suit and tie.

A head shot

looking straight into the camera

with an unwavering gaze.

Government approved,

as if I, too, were a faceless bureaucrat

stamping visas

processing forms.

Who knew

a smile could be subversive?

That insurrection begins

with a glint in the eye

and a tentative glimmer of teeth.

A flush in the cheeks

a tug at the lips

an innocent slip of the tongue.

In the early days of the corvid-19 quarantine, the New Yorker published a collection of essays under the title Dispatches From a Pandemic (April 13, 2020). The author Gary Shteyngart's contribution was called Adjusting to Prophylactic Life, Under Coronavirus Quarantine. The closing paragraph – which won't make any sense out of context, but that's not why I'm quoting it – contained a fleeting reference to a passport photo, and as soon as I read it this poem started writing itself. Which is how inspiration poems work: all they need is an unaccountable hook, and the gears start turning uncontrollably. They may not produce the best poems; but they are the most fun to write. Anyway, to give credit where it's due, here is that paragraph in full:

“During the early days of the New Truth, I want to grow out a beard that will be the envy of the local farmers. But before I do I go down to the village and get a passport photo taken for the After Times. They make you take off your glasses for passport photos, but I always forget: are you allowed to smile anymore? I think of life under the table and the laughter of my boy. The corners of my mouth crinkle. Koo-ka-ree-koo! ♦”

In the interest of correctness, I should note that glasses actually are to be removed. And also, I believe, smiles are now allowed: a minor technicality that I could hardly allow to get in the way of a good poem!