The Man Explains His Souvenirs, by Charles Rafferty

Twenty years ago, the skeleton
of a wild pig gleamed among violets
while the leaf rot around it
grew hot with spring. I slipped
the molar out of its grin like an oiled key
and took it home, leaving the boar
to reassemble, if it ever did,
at a gap-toothed resurrection. I hold it up
to show my daughters. They are less
impressed each year. I have antlers
and trilobites and chips of pretty bedrock
from all the places where the sun came up
to burn me awake with beauty — even
a turtle shell we used as an ashtray
in that first apartment, on the bank
of a creek that flooded every March
and took our trash to sea. All of it
sleeps in a basement box — a kind of coffin
for my former life, but also a proof
that I stooped to the world,
that I kept what came my way.