To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian
Tumbling through the
city in my mind without once looking up the racket in the lugwork probably rehearsing some stupid thing I said or did some crime or other the city they say is a lonely place until yes the sound of sweeping and a woman yes with a broom beneath which you are now too the canopy of a fig its arms pulling the September sun to it and she has a hose too and so works hard rinsing and scrubbing the walk lest some poor sod slip on the silk of a fig and break his hip and not probably reach over to gobble up the perpetrator the light catches the veins in her hands when I ask about the tree they flutter in the air and she says take as much as you can help me so I load my pockets and mouth and she points to the step-ladder against the wall to mean more but I was without a sack so my meager plunder would have to suffice and an old woman whom gravity was pulling into the earth loosed one from a low slung branch and its eye wept like hers which she dabbed with a kerchief as she cleaved the fig with what remained of her teeth and soon there were eight or nine people gathered beneath the tree looking into it like a constellation pointing do you see it and I am tall and so good for these things and a bald man even told me so when I grabbed three or four for him reaching into the giddy throngs of yellow-jackets sugar stoned which he only pointed to smiling and rubbing his stomach I mean he was really rubbing his stomach like there was a baby in there it was hot his head shone while he offered recipes to the group using words which I couldn’t understand and besides I was a little tipsy on the dance of the velvety heart rolling in my mouth pulling me down and down into the oldest countries of my body where I ate my first fig from the hand of a man who escaped his country by swimming through the night and maybe never said more than five words to me at once but gave me figs and a man on his way to work hops twice to reach at last his fig which he smiles at and calls baby, c’mere baby, he says and blows a kiss to the tree which everyone knows cannot grow this far north being Mediterranean and favoring the rocky, sun-baked soils of Jordan and Sicily but no one told the fig tree or the immigrants there is a way the fig tree grows in groves it wants, it seems, to hold us, yes I am anthropomorphizing goddammit I have twice in the last thirty seconds rubbed my sweaty forearm into someone else’s sweaty shoulder gleeful eating out of each other’s hands on Christian St. in Philadelphia a city like most which has murdered its own people this is true we are feeding each other from a tree at the corner of Christian and 9th strangers maybe never again.
