Li-Young Lee explained the impetus for “The Gift” in an interview with Bill Moyers, collected in Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee (see Further Literary Resources for more the sources mentioned in this section):

I was with my wife in a hotel and I woke up and heard her sobbing. I looked for her and she was sitting on the edge of the bathtub, sobbing and holding her hand. I noticed that her hand was bleeding, and when I looked there was a splinter under her thumbnail. My father was dead at the time, but when I bent down to remove the splinter I realized that I had learned that tenderness from my father (Ingersoll, Pages 35-36).

Lee plays with time in “The Gift” in an attempt to replicate this real life experience: A situation in the present reminded him of the past by accident, so he is expressedly not trying to write a moral-lesson poem in which the past provides some kind of framework for how to live his adult life. In other words, Lee is only reminded of the story of his father and the “iron sliver” (Line 5) when he finds himself responding in kind to his wife.