The poem “Fig of Unfolding” originated as a challenge a friend and I made with each other to write a poem with the word “fig” in it. We both liked the word, and I was particularly attracted to its sound in Spanish, “higo,” which I associated with the biblical stories I read and listened to as a boy. For me, the fig elicited images of bearded apostles, wild prophets, gentle kings, and rocky hillsides. The word also awakened my desire for its taste, even though I didn’t come to know it until I was much older.
Since 2018, I have been writing all of my poetry in notebooks, realizing that I like to hold in my hands tangible evidence of process, which is to say, the hand-written drafts, which in turn satisfy my inclination for artifacts. In the first drafts, I think I know where I want the poem to go, for instance, in my first attempt at “Fig of Unfolding,” dated 4/12/21:
I planted a fig tree
and I could hear how its silence
had a river in it
Imagine: loving the word fig
Fig of unfolding
Fig of your love
Imagine a lost metaphor
finding its mother’s ghost
I eat a fig and I forget
dates and faces
but I never remember to grieve
The poem I might have intended to write, as evidenced in this first draft, seems to me had to do more with a universal take on remembrance and less to do with the more personal narrative father/son relationship the poem became. Here lies the tension between the hand that writes and what is written. What is written often has the upper-hand, and I must come back to it with a stranger’s ear, pretending I did not write it. Which is my way to test whether to keep writing what I intended, or step back and listen attentively so I can figure out what the poem needs or wants. What paths to clear for it so it can go on its way. For this to happen, I must trust my process and my intuition. I must listen to sound and image and venture into roads the draft also clears for me, paths that, more than likely, I did not have the vision to see from the outset.
Months later, when I came back to the poem in a draft dated 10/21/21, it evolved in unexpected ways, getting closer to its final version:
Tonight I expect the moon to be
a bright, happy yawn in the sky
so bright I won’t know much
about sorrow, how it feels like,
or how it looks like, though
I’ve always imagined it to
look like a fruit be small
and round and taste like a
fruit, a plum, or a fig.
Which reminds me:
I was still a boy when I watched my father
plant a fig tree in the backyard
whose silence I believed had a river in it.
I didn’t know much about trees
or the fruit in their wombs
but I knew enough
about the river running through
my father’s quiet as he worked
dug a hole to make his offering.
Imagine, years later, loving the word fig,
like excavating a lost metaphor,
encountering reuniting it with its mother’s ghost.
The fig tree is no longer there,
The backyard no longer ours,
but in my mind, I can still follow the path
that leads to the wound
of knowing that the casket
was too small for you.
Even in death the horizon
creeped along the line of its beginning.
Even in death your sunlight
blossoms into the room of my desire.
And I say this quietly
because the word despair
doesn’t belong in this poem
just like the moonlight
doesn’t need a sky
to move through me
like a thread through a needle’s eye.
Here, I can see traces of the first draft, but also transformation: words, images, lines, and bits of myself, too. I am almost sure there were more drafts between the first one and this last one documenting the poem’s journey, but I have no idea where they are.
This is not autobiography, so I am fine with inaccuracies and evasions. I don’t know much about figs or fig trees other than what I imagine they are. My father planted many kinds of trees, but never a fig tree. However, in my poems, I do tend to always include a word, image, or situation that is factual, which is how I imbue my poem with sincerity. The fig tree to us was something exotic, something literary and biblical, unlike the mulberry tree, which I actually did see my father plant when I was a boy. I also saw him plant peach trees, guava trees, and many different kinds of flowers. Anchoring emotion with this memory of my father digging up the earth to plant trees and flowers helps me believe in the poem, believe in its truth.
This is why I write and rewrite the poem over and over by hand, because small but significant changes happen in the process, especially in terms of the poem earning my trust and having me believe in what it says. To get there, I rewrite the poem till every word is embodied with breath or heartbeat. And rewriting poems is pleasure for me, a pleasure linked to how I copy poems in notebooks by poets I enjoy reading, something I’ve done since 2007. As I do this, I teach myself technique and internalize a poem’s being. As I rewrite, I teach myself my own poem. Internalize it.
In the final version of “Fig of Unfolding,” I tried to keep the diction consistent so as not to disrupt the softness of syllables, which was a way to rein in emotion so it wouldn’t come off as a wild horse rearing and snorting on the page.
The word fig in Spanish is “higo,” and as I write this I notice how close this is to the word “hijo,” this near-homophone for “son,” and I, a son, like the father in the poem, plant words on the page, an act like planting trees, whose shade, I hope, will unfold across a stranger’s face.
