The hairy man on the concrete slab
sticks wet straw in his nose.
Once acrobat of a green bright place, once
black of eye and virginal of demeanor,
Mona Lisa ingenue,
flame hair spiking a hundred points,
everything interesting, alive
to delight and every possibility,
lingonberries bursting from within.
Betrayed by kidnappers, jailkeepers,
dieticians who take the fun out of food,
piling it in a trough beside the springdoor,
and now by time that makes
shredded unrolling tractor tires of us all.
Now denizen of the hard gray country,
he makes no unnecessary moves,
wrinkled brown banana fingers stiff with callus,
the body so attenuated once, airborne miles
from fingertip to toe, now collapsed
into rubber, a puddle of meat and hair, his body an eraser
grading the striated cement,
the look on his face a mirror of grief and disgust
the life is so boring and death is so slow.
And the sniff of the straw in the nose is as rich
and as dank as a distant dream
of roosting spots in trees,
of orchid and lemon, where the wild people
bite blossoms from their stems,
blink languidly at the tumult below,
in Papua, chewing, a long time ago.