My son asks what dragonflies

are for, if not just pretty. Bees we know

drink catmint, the fat striped

 

ones sweet enough to touch.

When I was my son's age

my aunt caught one sleeping on a bottle

 

and held out her hands, clasped like

the concave end of a spyglass:

Look at the bee. Do you want to hold it?

 

At my grandfather's funeral

I was allowed to take one flower

from the blanket on the casket. It was

 

enormous, the cost of all

those flowers in late December.

Thirty years later, his wife looked

 

like a stranger without her glasses,

like a baby swaddled

in an embroidered pink casket liner, the cost

 

shared between four daughters, and still

my mother hates the sight

of poinsettias, and still I regret the stringy mum

 

I took at the cemetery and never pressed, recall the porch:

tweezing a splinter out of his thumb

one evening not too long before he died, he smiled.