Job’s Daughter Gives a Tour

This is where I fell that day.
Here, here, this yellowing figure, so
congruent you’d think I was told to fall
just this way.
The next field over,
my father’s pretty red lambs.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.
First, there were snout accusing heaven.
Then faces clogging the well.
Then the sequence of my sisters.

Me, I was strangled. At dusk,
coming in from the field.

At some point, I covered my face with my arm:
That’s what she’s doing there in the shallow grass.
Because she thought that if she couldn’t see them, then--
Oh dear.

Now I see it’s out of habit.
A young girl spread like that on the grass, the good
earth, oh, so good, the sun so lovely,
as slowly, slowly, the lovers
move down her stretched body--

And he would watch.
He’d watch as he watched that day,
one hand moving over his growth.
Take it from a girl who knows:
all He deems witness are voyeurs.

Look where I point--
Over there, there--
that’s where he’d stand,
past the edge of the field,
not quite to the house--
and I saw him through the stalks and thought I would live--