Wilderness Interface Zone

These bargained years I’ve toiled in the fields
With you, tending, in my distraction, ample yields,
Though when the wind pressed down the grain
There was nothing, or when the sheep would flurry
And part as if a man were walking through,
Joseph, it was never you.
Plaited, golden stalks crowded down
And rose again in gusts,
Or caravans in moving dreams of dust
Dissolved into white plains.
Once,
While in the upper orchards,
On a terrace with the stripling fruits,
Driving away wiry goats
Whose wild lips strayed too near the tender shoots,
Against yellow crop and sliding green,
Stripes of soil, pale dust, and the woad sky,
I thought I saw your garment—you bearing it—
Your breast goat’s blood red, your eyes
Turned from me.
I shouted: The land shifted
In some slight breeze, the goats lifted
Their nobbed heads.

When we merchants
Wandered home, our sons trailing behind
Like snagged threads,
I watched our father become tethered
To the land and to Benjamin by never-ending dread.
He ever mourned you.  Benjamin led
Him about, as Rachel’s scent clung to his hair
And to his smooth skin.
And when Tamar, that raven, returned
My signet, my bracelets, my staff
And my seed to me, and I mused upon the gold,
Watching it burn in her hand as she thrust it forth,
A hunger stirred within:
I groaned to see all I had so lost again.

Then came the year bladed heat scraped
From the land its golden roe,
And we turned, under thin, waterless clouds, to go
To Egypt—to the Egyptian, royal
Over the flameless burning of the world.
I could not know
This treasurer of bread was the grown
Dreamer we lowered.
Not from the guttering in his face,
Not from his longing, as protective lord,
To view remains of what bereaved Jacob adored—
Rachael’s prince, young Benjamin.
I shepherded the boy when Jacob sent us up
And watched the old man fearfully die,
His eyes
Exhausting in their lingering looks.
When I nearly lost to the mad Egyptian
The taste of silver gorged my mouth.
I remembered throwing Joseph in a pit;
Judah now came rising out of it.
I could not bear another hunger or
Lead a riderless donkey to Father Jacob’s door,
Lowering all of us once more.

So,
We are brothers again.
My bones, once brittle stalks, unbend;
My eyes release upon the moon of your face.
Having moved so deeply against my blood,
I envision why we anxiously tend
Our wild vine for redeemers.
Joseph,
Who should never frighten me like that again.

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Each line of this poem should be centered–it looks better that way–but I couldn’t find a way to do that.

“Judah” was first published in Inscape (Fall 1981): 23-24, then later in BYU Studies (Winter 1982): 106-107.  This version is revised from those.