Pat Winslow
The Photograph of the Year
It was the last frame of our film.
A brown man in the snow, the skull of a doll.
I thought he was a woman. So fine-boned, so thin.
And there was something defeated about him.
The way the sun smacked his neck and shoulders,
the way his arms stuck down in the ice.
He was like a child who has had too much
and sleeps from where she's sitting.
His head was in the slutch, face down.
The meltwater had made a little lake around him.
It cupped his face. We didn't dare lift him.
Helmut took the picture. There was a circle
on the back of his skull, like he'd been pecked or beaten.
His ears were shrivelled. Holes on the side of his head.
A new-born mouse or kitten with everything exposed.
I don't like to think how
his teeth clenched against his death,
how he bit the last breath
and tried to hold it there
last night five thousand years ago.
If you must know,
I don't look at it at all any more.
It's kept in a drawer.
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