Speak So I Can See You: On Jesse Nathan’s “Eggtooth”
Jesse Nathan, Eggtooth, Unbound Edition Press, September 2023, 136 Pages
“Manure brings good flowers,” it’s been said: “the more you stir it, the more you stink.” Who do you imagine speaking these words; what do you know about this person? Someone familiar with gardening, perhaps a little knowledge of farming, or maybe someone who knows nothing about either gardening or farming but has remembered the aphorisms of their youth. “In the heart, a fire,” the voice continues, “in the head, smoke.” With this new aphorism, abstracted from the practical knowledge of skill, has our sense of this person changed? What lessons the voice offers suddenly become more idiomatic: “All good things are three,” a phrasing distinct from the more commonly observed all good things come in threes. This difference characterizes the figure arranging the words, if such a figure exists at all. “Words pay no toll,” the voice says, yet as I describe these aphorisms here, in this context—prose designed to think about Jesse Nathan’s debut volume of poetry, Eggtooth (Unbound Edition Press, 2023)—they begin to lose the quality that makes their spokenness moving and strange. Here is Nathan’s poem “In Those Parts” in full:
A voice insists manure brings flowers
but also the more you stir it, the more you stink.
Sometimes the voice says, In the heart, a fire—
in the head, smoke. Sometimes
All good things are three.
Or, Words pay no toll.
Yet also
Speak so I can see you.
Not the poet, not what is more commonly called the “speaker” of a poem, but rather a disembodied “voice” moves through the structural placement of these aphorisms. The first verb “insists” conjoins the doubled condition of “sometimes” (does the degree of insistence change?), leading finally to the mind turning against itself with “or” (the voice choosing which aphorism is appropriate to the situation) then “yet also,” and another thing, yet another. Two operations happen at once: “a voice” speaks an idiom, then the poem arranges those clauses into lines which make a single stanza. “Speak so I can see you”: the arrangement of these aphorisms suggests a life “in those parts,” a remembered place that is not here, the poem’s present.
An eggtooth is the sharp bit of a baby bird’s beak, a temporary growth that helps it break from its shell that soon after disappears. Eggtooth is a volume that considers the past—private and public, intellectual and emotional—as creating the present conditions through which this poem might be heard right now. Listen to the start of the book’s first poem, “Straw Refrain”:
Young gray cat puddled under the boxwood,
only the eyes alert. Appressed to dirt. That hiss
the hiss of grasses hissing What should
What should. Blank road shimmers. On days like this,
my mind, you hardly
seem to be.
On days like these.
Does the mind strain itself to make these observations about the “young gray cat”? No article attached to subject, two sentence fragments in the middle of a stanza (“appressed to dirt. That hiss / the hiss of grasses hissing”) that begins with a complete sentence (“Young gray cat puddled under the boxwood, / only the eyes alert”). The center of the stanza, Nathan’s poem duets, the landscape transcribed in this new context like the voice that “insists manure brings flowers”: “What should / What should.” Yet the pattern of end-stopped and enjambed rhymes level the mind, pause once for “wood” and continue past “should,” pause once for “this” and continue past “hiss,” listen for a moment then continue until the stanza contracts, “on days like this” ultimately corrected to collude with the rhyme: “you hardly / seem to be. / On days like these.”
You hardly seem to be on days like these: this is a stanza we have heard before, but a stanza we have not heard in what feels like a long time. Nathan borrows this structure from John Donne, poems composed early in the seventeenth century. Robert Hass, in his introduction to the volume, considers Donne’s formal influence on Eggtooth, or what he calls a “musical theme”: “I will leave it to readers to identify what Nathan gets from this echo and borrowing. My sense is that it registers at the level of sound the way everything is like and not like everything else; it creates an ecosystem of echoic effects.” Just as the disembodied voice shapes itself with aphorisms, just as the landscape hisses in “Straw Refrain,” the “ecosystem of echoic effects” is a matter of what “seems to be,” how something stays the same just as it changes, or “the way everything is like and not like everything else.” Here is the first stanza of Donne’s “Witchcraft by a picture,” which Nathan identifies as a model for the kind of music he wants to create:
I fix mine eye on thine, and there
Pitty my picture burning in thine eye,
My picture drown’d in a transparent teare,
When I looke lower I espie,
Hadst thou the wicked skill
By pictures made and mard, to kill,
How many ways mightst thou performe thy will?
How does the “I” confront and evade itself? The subject of the first two lines does not repeat, omitted from the second verb “pity”; with an inflected syllable to begin the second line, the clause reads almost like an imperative to the speaker himself, the figure seeing his reflection. Then inverted syntax delays its subject—“I espie”—until after the image of his reflection “in a transparent teare” has been staged. As the enjambed “wicked skill” barrels forward into the next phrase, the mystery of “pictures made and mard, to kill” seems strangely normal to this person, almost expected.
It’s been said that witches could kill by making and destroying a picture of their victim. A rhyme lingers; the sentence continues beyond the rhyme. Donne’s poem is a self-sacrifice, and his attention to the way a line might begin and end models for Nathan a way to attain these “echoic effects.” Here, then, are the first two stanzas of “Eggtooth,” the title poem of Nathan’s volume:
And so at last spoke John Donne’s ghost. Leaned up
out of my book and nearly bit me.
“Seven,” he says, “sponsors creation but
also vice. Three (and four) holy, but three
marks the rooster’s count.” His face
was gold, pounded thin. “I say
use me like an eggtooth, break
the shell that shields you, let me be the germ,
hoarder-of-calcium, the bulb of sharp
caruncle, expression of beak (of horn)
that makes a toothlet to snout-thrust, a barb
to barb what’s chipped away
by the very thing maintained
and encased. Enamel glaze
Like the grass that hisses, like the voice that insists a rustic aphorism, the rest of the poem is spoken through John Donne, no further interjection from the person arranging his request in lines that rhyme. “Use me like an eggtooth”: for Nathan, what is the shell that needs breaking? Accuracy of experience, precision of language, the form appropriate to the mind that “hardly seems to be.” What seems like a process of withdrawal in Eggtooth rarely becomes an obfuscation. Another figure present in the poem, the thing to hiss or insist or speak, foregrounds in turn how these observations might happen in verse: what a rhyming stanza inflects in the landscape, how syntactical variation suggests to us these observations are being made right now, as we read the poem. Everything is like and unlike itself.
Writing on what we call the Metaphysical Poets, T.S. Eliot said, “A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.” A thought to Nathan is also an experience, and the sensibility modified is the utility of speech: aphorism, idiom, paraphrase. Nathan disappears; sometimes the creation of an “I” precludes knowledge and memories this figure could not have known otherwise; often another presence liberates, like the biological function of an eggtooth. “What the Cedar May Have Said” begins, “If I were half as free as you / I wouldn’t droop,” and the poem ends:
If you were half as free as me
you wouldn’t go –
you who leave not once, like guests,
but over and over, like friends.
The symmetrical possibility of freedom, the implication of the cedar saying something else—what it may have said, or what it may have said otherwise—positions you ambivalently: you are you as addressed by the cedar, and you are also I, the figure who imagines what the cedar may have said. Throughout Eggtooth, this pattern of voicing and interjection is not always so figuratively revealing. “The Whole Poop,” for example, begins with the claim of information: “In military slang, poop is the really valuable info. / As in, Gimme the whole poop on the guy.” Like the voice that insists “the more you stir it, the more you stink,” military slang is inherited: “My uncle, who did a tour in the navy, says so / and I’m thinking about it as I clear the bindweed / from the buffalo grass.” A thought occurs immaterial to the work at hand which in turns shapes that labor. The usefulness of this phrase, of course, extends beyond what it might have meant to the uncle during his navy years; Nathan attaches the idiom to the two-and-a-half stanza description of removing “the bindweed / from the buffalo grass.” The labor leads to language and its utility: part distraction and entertainment, part meditation on usefulness. Only in the context of military slang can one understand the way this info is “really valuable”—otherwise, like here in this poem, the idiom stages its own strangeness to finally become, by the end, an unthinkably natural expression: “Somewhere in the pasture’s air / a meadowlark trills. I hear / his song down its stair.”
The five sections of Eggtooth are followed by a Coda, a single poem titled “This Long Distance.” If one follows a narrative through these poems, they move from rural Kansas to a coastal city, from childhood to adulthood, and the art most clearly remembered over those years.
And he when he’d call his parents, his dad would begin
with weather – Five inches since Friday,
seven and three-tenths since Monday, it may even
hock up more – and his mother would inveigh,
or other times dial up other composings –
First frost came so we picked up the hoses,
slid the barn door closed
Stories about the weather lead to local gossip. Well into adulthood, a thousand miles from home—how does one share the aphorisms that will not quite be understood elsewhere? After these familiar patterns have been exhausted, without the physical proximity of body language, and without the avatar of John Donne or the cedar tree, the son can only make observations: “And the son, not really sure what then to say, / says an iconic radio tower, from where he sits, presents / like a comb jelly.” On the other end of the phone, parents respond to their son’s observation—particular to “where he sits,” the image presenting itself, a new city—with a final interruption. A last figure to embody what might not otherwise be said, with the “personal and clear” language “of the train out there,” the image traverses:
And they, who in his imagination
are in the dining room he knows well, hold up their phone, up against
the back window to let him hear
the call – so personal and clear –
of the train out there.
∩
Christian Wessels is a poet and critic from Long Island. His work has been supported by the Creative Writing Program at Boston University, the Stadler Center for Poetry, and the University of Rochester, where he is currently a PhD candidate. He splits his time between New York and Pforzheim, Germany.