1

I have become a fig thief.

My night walks include a stop at the neighbor's fig tree. Darkness makes it difficult to see the fruit from the leaf by the light of the street lamp. Even more difficult to discern an unripe fig from a ripe one. I read in shades and hues with Radu at my side, playing sentinel, his tiny nose twitching at every sound or possible mammalian scent nearby.

Radu eats a cicada. We return home with two green figs and a desire for something more.

2

In the Bible given to her by her father, Emily Dickinson pressed flowers. The archived copy of this Bible includes the flowers Dickinson pressed and left inside the pages.

The page on which Jesus kissed Judas on the cheek and later forewarned Peter that she would betray him has no flower —- it does not exist in Dickinson’s holy book. She cut this page out completely.

Dickinson also dogeared the pages in Revelations which refer to the wormwood star and when the locusts come out in gold crowns and armor.

I marvel at the simple fact that the archives still hold the pressed flowers in Emily's Bible — how she didn't remove them.

Or maybe she did… Maybe flowers were pressed then enclosed in letters and correspondence, so the ones that are left in the Bible are the ones which were not selected to be mailed.

Did she pick which flower to enclose based on its relationship to language, or its place in the text his weight made it permanent, pressed?

3

Figs are propagated from cuttings and grow on their own roots.

The farmers market near our house has seasonal figs packed into small wooden baskets. My partner offers to buy a basket of figs to assuage my fig-frenzy. I tell him it's not the same: a fig purchased in daylight tastes different from a pit fig procured in darkness. An official fig is different from an illicit fig.

4

What charges the fig with such possibility? I turn to poems for more figgishness…

And find a fig tucked inside Ruth Stone’s “Translations,” where the fruit’s flesh becomes a memorial: “Alexander Mehielovitch Touitzen, fig of / my pallid college days, plum of my head, did the silk stocking / factory go up in flames?” He is the fig of my pallid college days. It is a poem that carries a fig quietly.

There is radical pssibility in the way a poem carries its fig, or the uses a poet makes of a fig. US Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman references the fig tree in her poem, “The Hill We Climb,” imagining a time and place where Black Americans can sit under vines and fig trees without being afraid. I thought this was interesting — how the poem changes the fig to fit what the poem imagines. Poems can do this. Poems can consecrate objects into impossible, imaginable images. I mean, simply: figs aren’t often planted in vineyards, since their deep roots and massive branches take up alot of soil that might be otherwise used for vines. And unlike grape-vines, figs are fairly common trees, whose branches tend to cover the entire trunk, leaving little space for sitting beneath. Gorman’s fig tree is on a hill of hope, and it is not the fig tree that has existed throughout history — it is a new fig, a fig of the future which changes how we exist in relation to each other and time.

5

“I was a little tipsy on the dance of the velvety heart rolling in my mouth,” Ross Gay says, in “To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian”.

“Oh many-branching candelabrum, oh strange up-starting fig-tree, Oh weird Demos, where every twig is the arch twig, each imperiously over-equal to each, equality over-reaching itself like the snakes on Medusa's head, Oh naked fig-tree!” D. H. Lawrence rhapsodizes in “Bare Fig-Trees”.

“Oh bring us some figgy pudding,” commands the traditional caroling song.

6

In the parable of the barren fig tree found in Luke 13:6–9 (NRVS), Jesus seems to suggest that a tree which doesn’t bear fruit should be destroyed:

Then he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’ He replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’ ”

Denise Levertov responds to this bleak parable by allowing the fig tree to speak in her poem, “What the Fig Tree Said:”

But I, I knew that
helplessly barren though I was,
my day had come. I served
Christ the Poet,
who spoke in images

Likewise, Donald Hall takes up the failed fig tree in “Syllables of a Small Fig-Tree”:

7

The Mesopotamians were the first to cultivate figs, which spread from Iraq to Syria, and then to the Greek Islands by the Phoenicians in 9 B. C., where they developed an auspicious signification in myth and ritual.

Romulus and Remus, the founders of ancient Rome, were suckled by a she-wolf under a fig tree.

Greeks honored the winners of races with the foliage and fruit of the fig.

Myth has it that Zeus pursued Ge and her son, Sykeus in the war of the Titans, and Ge, desperate to save her son, metamorphosed into a fig tree that would distract Zeus.

Ancient statues used fig leaves to cover the pudendial regions of statues when they decided to draw a line between the sacred and profane in human flesh. In Mythologies, Roland Barthes mourned the presence of the fig leaf covering the newly-privatized area:

“Woman is desexualized at the very moment when she is stripped naked…We may therefore say that we are dealing in a sense with a spectacle based on fear, or rather on the pretence of fear, as if eroticism here went no further than a sort of delicious terror, whose ritual signs have only to be announced to evoke at once the idea of sex and its conjuration.

…This ultimate triangle, by its pure and geometrical shape, by its hard and shiny material, bars the way to the sexual parts like a sword of purity.”

An Irish gallery decided to remove the fig leaves from its male statues in order to show that, when it comes to penis size, “small is beautiful.”

8

Viewing the fig tree as an enclosure of sacred space is an ancient practice. In Amanda Gorman’s poem, the fig tree encloses a hoped-for safety.

Located between Athens and Eleusis, there is a place known as the “Holy Fig” — where a tree Demeter had given as a gift to Phytolus, king of the land of Cephsius, still grew beneath a tited roof tended by priestesses of the Eleusian mysteries. The inscription on Phytalus’s tomb read:

“Hero and king, here Phytolus received the majestic Demeter, when first she brought fourth the first fig of autumn, which mortal man called the sacred fig.”

9

MY FATHER AND THE FIG TREE

For other fruits, my father was indifferent.
He’d point at the cherry trees and say,
“See those?  I wish they were figs.”
In the evening he sat by my beds
weaving folktales like vivid little scarves.
They always involved a figtree.
Even when it didn’t fit, he’d stick it in.
Once Joha was walking down the road
and he saw a fig tree.
Or, he tied his camel to a fig tree and went to sleep.
Or, later when they caught and arrested him,
his pockets were full of figs.

At age six I ate a dried fig and shrugged.
“That’s not what I’m talking about! he said,
“I’m talking about a fig straight from the earth –
gift of Allah! —  on a branch so heavy
it touches the ground.
I’m talking about picking the largest, fattest,
sweetest fig
in the world and putting it in my mouth.”
(Here he’d stop and close his eyes.)

Years passed, we lived in many houses,
none had figtrees.
We had lima beans, zucchini, parsley, beets.
“Plant one!” my mother said.
but my father never did.
He tended garden half-heartedly, forgot to water,
let the okra get too big.
“What a dreamer he is.  Look how many
things he starts and doesn’t finish.”

The last time he moved, I got a phone call,
My father, in Arabic, chanting a song
I’d never heard. “What’s that?”
He took me out back to the new yard.
There, in the middle of Dallas, Texas,
a tree with the largest, fattest,
sweetest fig in the world.
“It’s a figtree song!” he said,
plucking his fruits like ripe tokens,
emblems, assurance
of a world that was always his own.

This poem is from 19 Varieties of Gazelle, one of my favorite books by Naomi Shihab Nye.

There is a blurring of pronouns, or a way in which the word he travels throughout this poem, and changes shapes. The first stanza refers to Joha, a trickster figure in Palestinian folktales — he, too, is present among the trees and he’s. The poem takes place in Dallas, Texas, a booming metropolis, a city known for its speed and rapid growth, where the father longs for the fruits of his childhood and homeland.

To raise a family in a foreign country, to make a new life, should not require self-erasure. The relationship between fidelity, longing, and nostomania, or yearning for a homeland, develops throughout this poem as Shihab Nye carefully reveals the intersections of past and present. The father wants to build a livable future for his loved ones.

The turn in the poem comes in the final stanza, when the father begins singing in Arabic, showing his daughter a thriving fig tree, describing his chant: “It’s a figtree song!” There is a sense in which both finds and creates this fig tree song on foreign soil. I heard a home in it. The poem offers an inheritance, a future patrimony, for the displaced refugee.

Nisha Atalie’s gorgeous poem, “The Fig Tree”, also touches on the fruit’s relationship to immigration, and the sharing of fruit as a bridge that summons the homeland. As a mixed poet of South Asian and European descent from the Pacific Northwest, Atalie writes of the father who plants both fig tree and Japanese maple before leaving. These trees are picked up by the daughter as both inheritance and longing.

The fathers plant trees and daughters. I think of the plum trees my mother planted from Romanian seeds (which she had me carry illegally in my child backpack over Customs borders). My first kiss flowered near those plums, near the stories and luck said to abide in them. In the successful growing of this tree across a border, one samples a soft repudiation of assimilationist logic.

10

Incompetence nestles near distraction.

Feckless rhymes with reckless.

A verb, shoot, is dangerous when someone is carrying not a camera but a gun.

Florescence can be violent, excessive, decadent, a bloomburst is silent but visually loud.

“You can lean back in the long grass and cover up the sun with your toe,” Dan Beachy-Quick wrote.

Because Hesiod said it is safe to travel when “a man thinks that the leaves at the top of the fig tree are as big as the footprint a crow leaves as it goes,” I take a photo of the neighbor’s fig tree today, and try to eyeball the measurements of the top leaf. It seems safe to travel.

The crow knows how man should travel; the fig tree reveals the crow’s secrets.

11

I read Bambi yesterday. There are no fig trees in the forest, in the book which Felix Saltern subtitled "Life in the forest”.

Figs came to the Americas and various islands by way of Spanish and Portuguese missionaries (see "mission figs"). Perhaps in those places, the relationship between figs and colonization alters the tone of the fig tree, rendering it less familial and more reminscient of lost autonomy.

12

Night again. The kids are complaining about more things they need for school.

The shield of Heracles has in its center an image of "Fear, made of adamant, unspeakable, glaring backwards with eyes shining like fire." Fear tries to look back at the one carrying the shield.

I am afraid someone will see me loosening figs, and eating them. Robert Calasso said nothing angers the gods as much as humans eating things, removing them from the face of the earth by consuming them. The gods subsist on nectar and ambrosia. Humans are the fools who hanker for fruit.

Radu barks twice and stares into the funnel of darkness. I am afraid someone is watching —- someone who has seen me do this many times on their security camera. Someone who is torn between disgust and amusement.

Darkness is my shield from the eyes of others, from the dailyness of normal, acceptable, neighborly conduct. Since thieves have no allotted angels, Radu is my guardian woof.