50 of 100: "Little Champion," a poem by Tony Hoagland about butterfly puddling

I recently started following the poet George Bilgere's online newsletter "Poetry Town." As he puts it, every day he "selects a poem by a writer he’s crazy about and he says a few words about why he picked it." It's something I look forward to. Last week he shared this poem, by Tony Hoagland, a poet I love. "How many times have I felt like this little champion!" he wrote. "I guess my question for you is: who, or what, is your animal? I guess most of us have one." (The photo accompanied the post; it's by Ray Cannon, a red lacewing butterfly "puddling" on a dead frog.)

Little Champion

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

and when I have to drive 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 explain his recipe for German beer,

or listen to the scholar tell, once more,
about his book intended to destroy, once and for all,
the cult 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 kind of thoughtfulness.

The American Museum of Natural History has this to say about puddling: 

Male butterflies drink water to get sodium and other dissolved minerals they can't obtain from food. This drinking behavior is called "puddling." They do it on lake shores, in rainforest puddles, or even in dew drops. Some butterflies can puddle for hours, drinking hundreds of gut-loads of water. They excrete the water and retain the salts. 

Because of its high salt and mineral content, urine is especially healthy for butterflies. There's even some evidence that butterflies prefer the urine of meat-eating animals, although we don't know why. 

Male butterflies pass the nutrients from puddling to females during mating.

My animal is the jackrabbit.