CHAIRS

Chairs, from Magpie Tales

My grandmother had long chestnut-colored hair, or so I've been told, and her photosgraphs in her youth show a woman with thick hair piled atop her head.  In her later years, she dyed her hair red.  She had married a man much older than she, and after his death she married again.  She did not have the luxury of musical chairs during those difficult years of the Great Depression.  I wonder if she ever looked back at the ones she might have chosen.

CHAIRS

Because she died shorn

of her crimped, hennaed glory

called shameless for 

someone her age, I hate short hair 

that clings to the skull

and risks nothing.  Her fiery

profusion I like to imagine as flaring

out into the sickroom to shock,

to accuse:  all she might have become

had she not said “I do” and sat down 

in that chair when he pulled it out, 

scraping the floor,

making idle talk stop for an instant.

the old women frown when 

she whispered I must have this,

canna lily she plucked from the vase

on the table to pin at the nape 

of her barely contained bun, 

what she called a chignon. 

The other chairs she might have

chosen,  did she reminisce as she

wandered away from them into

 the mirrors of middle-age?  Goaded

by what she saw,  she dyed her gray back

to flaming rebellion they cut off

the last day she lived, for the sake

of what family called Visitation--

the coffin lid opened, no time for

embarrassment.  People might gossip

about her lack of repentance, the devil’s

own red coming loose from the pins.

So she lay  without any complaint, 

as I too have sat cowed in the stylist’s chair 

watching  my dishwater blonde hair

descending around me like chaff.