Jesse Nathan
Transplant
As from the sunk springtooth’s rusty frame
they dig up me, they speak to me and to each other
in tones of those who feel—feeling plain—
they’ve always known, and yet just met, the other.
How now their gestures rhyme.
Together lower me into slime
and silt-slip, cold and fine,
and cradle-place my fragrant, adaptable rootball
and bole where awl-leaves spring,
immobile. I am the stuff of pencils.
Water beckons me to a new standing.
She nibbles—he lets her—his earlobe
as I sip the soil soaked by the hose,
high-hearted and stunned to the root-toes.
Jesse Nathan reads “Transplant”
Jesse Nathan’s first book, Eggtooth, won the 2024 New Writers Award. His poems have appeared in the New York Review of Books, the Kenyon Review, the Nation, and the Paris Review. He teaches literature at UC Berkeley and lives in Oakland.