Ross Gay begins this poem on the street level with the individual. He is utterly individual, to a fault, "tumbling through the city without once looking up". His concerns are "stupid" and the city is a lonely place, until he is brought into the community by the sound of a woman sweeping. 

 

It should be mentioned that the form of this poem is somewhat different than Two Bikers Embrace on Broad Street. They both are casual and in free verse, but this one is more disjointed and with shorter, choppier thoughts. It seems to be truer to how thoughts really are as we walk through the city, whereas Two Bikers Embrace on Broad Street felt more like someone who had learned a lesson looking back and interpreting the event for the reader. 

 

A woman sweeping underneath a fig tree interrupts the disjointed and solitary thoughts of the individual, who is now also underneath the "canopy", a phrase that implies the tree is protecting or shielding him in some way, covering him and including him in the space below the tree, and therefore the community of that space. 

 

The woman also was alone, until the individual walked below the tree. She too needed help from another human being in the community. Something is also said about age here, about older individuals in the city. They are especially vulnerable, to falls and to needing help with their work. As the individual picks figs from the tree, 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", implying that old people in the city still have fight in them and can still function on their own. She is different from the earlier "poor sod" and even from the woman who asked for help with the tree. 

 

Soon, a crowd is drawn. The fig tree serves as an opportunity for a community to gather and strengthen themselves. They leave with more than what they came with. They came as individuals, lonely and tumbling. They leave as members of a community, part of something larger, full, literally of figs and metaphorically of meaning and purpose. The people look up into the tree "like a constellation pointing do you see it". At this point in the poem, one might be reminded of the Parable of the Budding Fig Tree. It is told by Jesus in the New Testament, and the following quote is from Wikipedia (a source consistently disregarded as unacademic, but one that is great for quick information.

 

"See the fig tree, and all the trees. When they are already budding, you see it and know by your own selves that the summer is already near. Even so you also, when you see these things happening, know that the Kingdom of God is near. Most certainly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things are accomplished. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will by no means pass away."

— Luke 21:29-33, World English Bible

 

The fig tree in this poem could represent the budding reinvigoration of the community and the strengthening of the individual. Previously they were alone and lost, but when they see the tree, they know "the Kingdom of God is near" and that "this generation will not pass away until all things are accomplished". 

 

Things are accomplished within the community of the fig tree, as the individual is "tall and so good for these things and a bald man even told me so when I grabbed three or four for him". Things that may have previously seemed threatening, such as wasps, now are ignored, as the bald man only smiles and rubs his stomach, an act that is not compatible with the previous anonymity of the contained individual in the city. 

 

The figs are themselves somewhat intoxicating, with wasps that are "sugar stoned" and the individual "tipsy on the dance of the velvety heart rolling in my mouth". The figs remind the individual of when he ate his first fig "from the hand of a man who escaped his country by swimming through the night". This brings up the diversity of the city, much of which is populated by immigrants. Immigrants have planted themselves in the city and they have grown, in places they may or may not have been welcome or expected. The fig tree is representative of that, as it is a 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". 

 

Immigrants are individuals who leave their community and are individuals for a time, until they rejoin a new one. Gay, in his presentation of the fig tree and the community gathering around it, asserts that all individuals in the city are in need of rejoining their own diverse community. They are in need of allowing things to grow and allowing others near, though the individual is still uncomfortable when he "rubbed my sweaty forearm into someone else's sweaty shoulder". Community boundaries are pushed with physical contact around the fig tree, and as they are "gleeful eating out of each other's hands". 

 

Gay again presents the city as one of violence, one that "murdered its own people", and reasserts this to be true. Yet, as this community feeds each other from a tree that has flourished against expectations, it seems as though the "Kingdom of God is near". They are no longer individuals for the city to murder. They are not strangers anymore.