It came each month from Omaha
and Mother tossed it on my bed:
“This is for you.” But what it was
I had a hard time figuring-
short articles on Arbor Day,
patriotism, and my insurance needs:
The Woodman Magazine. I asked,
but never got much of an answer.
The last page printed dumb “Woodchuckles,”
from which I learned a favorite poem,
my first: “Big Ole had a goat.
The goat had halitosis. And everywhere
Big Ole went, the people held
their noses.” And now, a literary critic,
I realize it’s not a whole poem,
but just the start of one. I want
to know much more about this man
and his relationship with his goat,
and both of theirs to a society
that spurns their gifts. But I digress.
The point is, I accepted everything,
interpreted nothing. I couldn’t know
that every time my mother tossed
that magazine in my direction,
she thought-I am interpreting-
of my dead sister, secret Andrea,
dead one short year before my birth
and never talked about at all,
and how the first thing bought for me
was burial insurance. My sister:
car wreck, a patch of ice in Texas.
That’s the story Grandmomma told.
Although I’ve been much unemployed
and worse, a poet, in Daddy’s eyes
I’m still some version of success:
I’m forty years old, I’m alive.
Sometimes that’s all it comes down to.
And through me, I am proud to say,
live Ole, his goat, and its bad breath.
Why did the goat’s breath smell so bad?
Did Ole’s wife dislike the goat?
Or was the goat a consolation
to Ole after his wife died?
But this is not a Chekhov story.
I was my parents’ consolation-
something to fear for, hover over,
resist loving too much. Grandmomma said
my sister’s dying was God’s punishment,
they thought, for loving her too much,
for sin, for making her an idol
before the Lord. Interpretation.
I’ll gloss this story with another.
A white rat, stepped on by my brother,
raced madly in tight clockwise circles
for two days; then it died. For me,
that did it. No more pets. And that
was for a rat. Before my birth
they took care of my death. Once burned.
I get the statement twice a year.
It asks, “Have you insured your lifestyle?”
Although I’d much prefer to end
with Ole and his goat’s bad breath,
which seems to me-interpretation-
to represent mortality, I’m forced
to come back to my sister Andrea.
What did it cost to bury her?
I don’t mean emotionally. I mean
in dollars on the barrelhead
and how long they worked to pay it off.
Sometimes that’s what it comes down to.
My policy’s for eight hundred bucks.
But finally things do end with Ole,
who lives eternally because
he never lived. I know him better
than I know Andrea because I’m free
to speculate, invent, and ask about
the man, the goat, its halitosis.
Andrea. Each time we visited,
Grandmomma took her picture off the wall.
Burial Insurance
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