When I was little, we had a tree.
He carried himself like a social outcast;
spindly protrusions with stubby green needles
trying to pass as branches.

They jutted out,
perpendicular to his wiry trunk;
strategically separated,
like feuding relatives at a wedding reception.

My father named him Ralph.
He was neither tall nor short.

At Christmas time,
he was adorned with colored lights
and bright glass globes.

His wannabe branches drooped
under the comically heavy baubles,
as if decorated by Charlie Brown himself.

In his youth, Ralph’s
modest redwood container
buckled under the force of his ambition.

“I want more,”
he whispered from his suburban cell.
“A land of my own,
where I can stand among giants.”

One day, it became too much.
As hot days stacked
like dry pancakes,
brittle brown cracked through his veins.

Ralph was no more.
But he lived on,
because my father gave him a name.