Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

At the rest stop on the way to Mississippi

We found the butterfly mired in the oil slick;

its wings thick and blunted. One of us, tender in the fingertips,

smoothed with a tissue the oil

that came off only a little;

the oil-smeared wings like lips colored with lipstick

blotted before a kiss.

So delicate the cleansing of the wings I thought the color soft as

      watercolors

would wash off under the method of her mercy for something so slight

and graceful, injured, beyond the love of travelers.

It was torn then, even after her kindest work,

the almost-moth, exquisite charity could not mend

what weighted the wing, melded with it,

then ruptured it in release.

The body of the thing lifted out of its place

between the washed wings.

Imagine the agony of a self separated by gentlest repair.

“Should we kill it?” one of us said. And I said yes.

But none of us had the nerve.

We walked away, the last of the oil welding the butterfly

to the wood of the picnic table.

The wings stuck out and quivered when wind went by.

Whoever found it must have marveled at this.

And loved it for what it was and

had been.

I think, meticulous mercy is the work of travelers,

and leaving things as they are

punishment or reward.

I have died for the smallest things.

Nothing washes off.