Self-Portrait as Sarah, Confessing to Abraham

by Jennifer Bullis

Love, I was testing you
             when I bade you lie with my handmaid instead.
It had been so many years since the Voice

             had granted us a land for our descendants—
and you were feeling keenly your dearth
             of descendants. I suspected your trust

in the Voice was growing shaky,
             like both of our wrinkling hands.
I myself had rarely doubted

             that the promised child was far off.
Though the shock of the Voice’s promise
             shook a laugh out of me at the time,

I guessed that for a while, He would be keeping
             the fruition to Himself. But often,
in the hot afternoons when the tent grew quiet

             and the livestock dozed, faintly I could hear
the approaching child’s laughter flutter
             around my body like a gossamer cloak.

It called to mind my own brief vision of the Voice,
             given when my father gave me in marriage
to you: I half heard, half saw, fully knew

             your destiny would be to carve a blade
into our future son’s lean neck
             the way your own father had sliced and gouged

temple idols out of oak—so steely even then
             was your love for the Voice and His commands.
My love, I was jealous of the Voice, resented

             His custom of prolonged not-saying. I wanted Him
to have assured Noah’s wife that the two oranges
             per person per month would be enough.

I wanted Him to have warned you and Isaac
             what you and he would be committing to acting out
before you both came down from that mountain stunned

             and changed. Wanted you not to have turned
against our son, against every deity of trees.
             Against me.

::

Jennifer Bullis is the author of Impossible Lessons (MoonPath Press) and of poems and essays appearing in Cave Wall, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, RHINO Poetry, Terrain.org, and Water~Stone Review. She is an Artsmith Residency Fellow, recipient of honorable mention for the Gulf Coast Prize, and finalist for the Brittingham & Felix Pollak Prize and Moon City Poetry Award. She holds a PhD in English from University of California-Davis and lives in Bellingham, Washington, where she writes about long-distance foot travel, horse-keeping, motherhood, deforestation, and women in the courtroom.

Image: Craig Thomas

Image description: a young sheep stands with its mother on a grassy hill.