i.
When you press leaves,
the events of the day
also get caught,
the entomologist told me
and each of the twenty teeth
I had then
listened with undivided attention
as I watched her carefully place
the single rhododendron leaf
I had taken to her
between the pages
of a brown hardbound book
she told me was about mayflies.
ii.
She had lived alone
in a house across the street
that always looked a little unkempt
despite the absence of visible clutter.
And, if my mother visited her
and took me along,
she'd let me run my fingers
along the glass frames
that contained insects
pinned in an alphabetical order.
Aphididae. Antona. Bombus.
Cicadidae. Delina. Eucolaspis.
art: allison moore
iii.
I turn the pages
that have now turned purple
to find a bleached summer lilac
and the morning I had found it
rises around me
in sickly sweet scented fumes.
The morning that I had
found the summer lilac,
someone had found her
dead in her sleep.
iv.
When they gathered to arrange her funeral,
I was convinced
that she'd have asked
to be buried with her glassframed insects.
(Dust to dust, see?)
And, in the moment that I realised
that she had not,
I had loved her a little less.
Maybe because in my head,
she lived alone
because her eccentricity
occupied too much space,
and maybe because in my head,
the death of an entomologist
would not be so unceremonious.