I am looking at a photograph
from World War II.
A soldier stands alone
facing north toward China.
His left foot rests on a football
as if he had just stopped its bouncing
and his hat is cockeyed
as if he had just slapped it on.
He appears at the right
edge of the paper,
in the center there is a distant mountain
and on the left is nothing remarkable.
The photograph does not tell us
what has just happened
to arrest his attention,
or what he is seeing
that will happen next.
All we know is that in the junction
of the inevitable past
and the probable future,
he was not alone and
that someone was interested
in preserving a fragment
of his time.
2001