Bookends

My twelve-year-old cousin said Turtle Wax should do the trick
when Poppy’s hair began to thin out after chemo,
as if sixty-five years of all-natural, jet-black hair were enough.

Delicate, it returned for our final visit, as if to offer a comfort
that only a child is bold enough to reach for—a patch
of lasting faith these hands, now grown, long to feel again.

With the final treatment finished, his hair was the only impatience
around the homeplace, couldn’t wait to grow back,
eager as my little sister getting born in time to see him living.

In a photograph, they rest alike in his hospice bed,
which, like any crib, can’t contain a body long.
Their heads crowned in darkened reminders beyond count,

tactile proof to support the lies that life has a soft beginning
and end, a memory my fingers keep near
to rub like the rabbit’s feet we believed in as children,

sacred as the lock of Dad’s baby hair, saved
between the pages of Psalms in the family Bible. We believed
red, yellow, or blue rabbits existed somewhere and gave

their paws willingly for our luck’s sake—not dyed
or dead to us, but natural as Poppy’s hair when it returned
black as my sister’s began. Together, presenting us bookends

to life, soft as the felt undersides protecting the piano’s
surface from heavy Praying Hands, stone paperweights
solid enough to keep Nanna’s hymnals upright.

Burning Incandescent

We’re bad about leaving the lights on.
It’s become a family joke to quote Pap
muttering at Mamaw: Get that man outta my pocket.

That man referring to the whole city electric company:
board members, the TVA that bought his father’s land to flood
and dam, the secretaries who took it down in shorthand,

the climbers in their hard hats and spiked boots
finding footing up stained poles splintered
as the clayed soil they’d exchanged his family land for;

my pocket referring to the Dickies that held a wallet
full of ones to let buyers at the flea market know
he could make change for what he sold Sundays

to balance out what he said the preacher got from Mamaw
at church: Must’a gave a good little talk for that kind of money,
he told Dad as career advice while fixing appliances for near nothing,

Dad’s adolescence spent to hold the damn light still, jarring him
from daydreams of ball practice, leaving scuffed fingers searching out
loose wiring—dropped screws in the dark.

Pap’s last light flickered from the hospital bed,
after he’d long given up weekend work to warm the pew
at Mamaw’s side—him sitting silent, never singing

but swollen, taking in Scripture and hymn like his hands
and feet would take to IVs. Holding a jaundice glow, his eyes
became a matte stare muted—less filament than reflection,

akin to the features of his ’48 Buick:
grill frowning its future, mouth open, breathing out Sunday
like leaky whitewalls,

and chrome-rimmed headlights as beacons—
Pap’s fixed eyes fading past time, light
no life could hold steady.

Seth Grindstaff teaches high school English in northeast Tennessee. He received his MA in English from ETSU, and his poetry has been honored at the John Fox Jr. Literary Festival in Virginia and published in a variety of journals. He spends his time alongside his sun-loving wife and foster children.

Header image by Seth Grindstaff