Canary Island Date Palm
Couldn’t say the dream I had last night.
But I might start
by saying your dates
were motionless in a breeze,
almost orange like bittersweet,
almost yellow
like bittersweet.
*
First Love Song
You were never like the poets,
windy-eyed behind their open windows,
making notes before they knew
how dear the cost.
You taught me how to hear
summer on the rain,
and the wind came flapping through it,
and I gaped, unafraid.
_________________________
“Canary Island Date Palm” first appeared in Plume, #142, June 2023. “First Love Song” first appeared in BOMB, #164, Summer 2023. Eggtooth by Jesse Nathan is available via Unbound Edition Press.
Jesse Nathan
Jesse Nathan’s first book of poems, Eggtooth, appears this month. His work has appeared in the Paris Review, the New York Review of Books, and The Nation, among other magazines. Nathan was raised in rural Kansas and northern California, and he lives now in Oakland.
