Little Champion: A Selection from Tony Hoagland’s Application for Release from the Dream (2015)

When I get hopeless about human life,
which, to be frank, is far too difficult for me,
I try to remember that in the desert there is
a little butterfly that lives by drinking urine.

And when I have to take the bus to work on
Saturday,
to spend an hour opening the mail,
deciding what to keep and throw away,
one piece at a time,

I think of the butterfly following its animal
around,
through the morning and the night,
fluttering, weaving sideways through
the cactus and the rocks.

And when I have to meet all Tuesday afternoon
with the committee to discuss new by-laws,
or listen to the dinner guest exhaustively describe
his recipe for German beer,

or hear the scholar tell, again,
about her campaign to destroy, once and for all,
the vocabulary of heteronormativity,

I think of that tough little champion
with orange and black markings on its wings
resting in the shade beneath a ledge of rock
while its animal sleeps nearby;

and I see how the droplets hang and gleam
among
the thorns and drab green leaves of desert plants
and how the butterfly alights and drinks from
them
deeply, with a stillness of utter concentration.

—Tony Hoagland, “Little Champion,” Application for Release from the Dream (2015)