STILL LIFE WITH HALF OF WALTER MITTY

Retain the good and sullen parts in lye
and let the dreaming leak and stew in jars.
We have his torso like Apollo's husk
taxidermied, hung above the mantel
where all good things are full and stiff and fixed:
several generations' thumbs, a tacked-up
sun facsimile, my botched shop cutting
board project: a pineapple or a bomb,
a collar or a tourniquet slipped down
through generations, hockey stick once used
by Bobby Orr with whom my cousins played
which still exhibits blood as fast as trace
or thunderhead, resists the light like song
or black sap tolling gong-like from a trunk.

   first published in Pleiades