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  • Fingerprints, and: At the Winery
  • Linda Pastan (bio)

Fingerprints

If you sign up for Global Entry, you can skip the long security lines at airports and will not have to remove your jacket or shoes.

from a travel magazine

I’m asked questions about travel—What countries I’ve visited, how long I stayed.

They press my fingers to a pad then frownand shake their heads and press again.

They say I have no fingerprints.(Have I lost them, simply misplaced them?)

They say my skin is smooth as glass—no grooved lines, no patterns.

I’ve finally become anonymous—a wave whose ribbed imprint on the sand

has washed away as whorls do in emptying bathtubs,sucked down the drain, leaving nothing behind.

I’m free now to rob houses,commit murders leaving no trace.

(My love, if I caress you in the dark, will it seemas if a knife blade has touched you?)

I’ll wear mittens, clench my fists.I’ll hide my hands in my pockets

as if they were untrained animals.As if they were tiny terrorists themselves. [End Page 175]

At the Winery

1.The grapes are as round,as smooth as beadsa child might string togetherand wear like pearlsaround her neck.

2.Asleep for yearsin the barrel: a dark purple seawith no tide, only the slowinvisible change from proseto poetry.

3.Syrah…Pinot Noir…Chardonnay…Voluptuous sound of a corksurrendering.

4.The answerto every question:Intoxication.

5.The vintner is old now,shriveled and small.In the lush air, sour-sweethint of raisins. [End Page 176]

Linda Pastan

Linda Pastan is the author of more than a dozen collections of poetry, including Insomnia (Norton, 2015). She was Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1991 to 1995 and has been a finalist twice for the National Book Award. She won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2003.

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