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Butter

By Connie Wanek b. 1952 Connie Wanek

Butter, like love,

seems common enough

yet has so many imitators.

I held a brick of it, heavy and cool,

and glimpsed what seemed like skin

beneath a corner of its wrap;

the décolletage revealed

a most attractive fat!

And most refined.

Not milk, not cream,

not even crème de la crème.

It was a delicacy which assured me

that bliss follows agitation,

that even pasture daisies

through the alchemy of four stomachs

may grace a king's table.

We have a yellow bowl near the toaster

where summer's butter grows

soft and sentimental.

We love it better for its weeping,

its nostalgia for buckets and churns

and deep stone wells,

for the press of a wooden butter mold

shaped like a swollen heart.

Source: Poetry (February 2000).

Biography

Born in Madison, Wisconsin, poet Connie Wanek grew up on a farm outside Green Bay and in Las Cruces, New Mexico. She was educated at New Mexico State University. Wanek’s poetry collections include Bonfire (1997), winner of the New Voices Award from New Rivers Press, and Hartley Field (2002). Her image-driven poems often engage nature and natural order. Praising Hartley Field, poet David Orr observed, “Wanek is from Wisconsin, . . .

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