Dave Bonta's poem reads like a dream, and its subtitle says as much: it comes from the "last dream before waking." In it, a grandfather has never officially died but has simply stopped moving. The family carries him from house to car and back again, a pale figure who can hold any pose. They speak for him, claiming to know what "Pop-pop would say," though his face never changes. The tone is deadpan and oddly practical, even funny, as when his not eating becomes "a relief for everyone."
The mood shifts when the siblings gather to divide the estate. The room turns to coal, and they wear headlamps and listen for canaries, as miners do. The speaker seems to be sliding into the old man's past, and perhaps toward his fate. The poem suggests that an inheritance is more than money. It is a way of living on through other people's voices, and the final nervous laugh, which sounds just like him, shows how he still haunts them.