Faced with a scene of cloud white flowers
Job asks the crow, What do you see?
Sheep spreading, replies the crow,
across the earth’s surface.
Convolvulus arvensis, answers Job,
common to Kansas.
Twenty feet, he says with a shrug,
is where the roots sleep.

They try to gauge how much it would take
to rip it out. Think of it, says the crow, its shocked
roots rising, its jagged strings of plant.
It’d look like sheets of ice, says Job, cracking.
Sheep God loves, says the crow, beaming.
They are silent. They breathe.

Anyway it’s just clouds, they say.
It’s just white flowers, they say

Jesse Nathan’s poems have appeared in the Nation, jubilat, the American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He’s working on a PhD in English Literature at Stanford and he’s a founding editor of the McSweeney’s Poetry Series. He lives in California.