This is called "To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian."
And this is in Philadelphia.
It's a Philadelphia poem.
Tumbling through the city in my mind without once looking up,
the racket and the lug work 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.
Please.
Help me.
So I load my pockets and mouth and she
points to the stepladder 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, pointing, looking
into it like a constellation.
Do you see it?
And I am tall.
It's 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 stone 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 nights,
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.
Come here, 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 was a way the fig tree grows and grows.
It wants, it seems, to hold us.
Yes, I am anthropomorphizing, God damn it.
I have twice, in the last 30 seconds,
rubbed my sweaty forearm into someone else's sweaty shoulder,
gleeful, eating out of each other's hands
on Christian street 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.