Book Details

Ambition Tree

We row to the island on the DuPage River
and swear allegiance to Peter Pan:
we’ll never grow up. Stripped
to his Fruit of the Looms
perched against the unmade sun
in the top of a cottonwood,
my brother scouts the horizon
for grownups and salutes me.

One branch cracks. He grasps
at a limb and thrashes
fi ngers splayed
grabs at one then another branch,
picks up speed, crashing
weight of his body
strips branches as if he’s ripped
the sky open
until

he falls. Just falls.

Sped to Elmhurst Hospital;
surgeons snip out his spleen
and hook him to machines,
a pale imitation of himself--
a boy without his shadow.

Forty years later, president of a corporation,
he sits in the shade of a huge oak
by his country club and tells me, “I am
in it just for the bucks. Just for the bucks.”

He is happy and overweight,
has lost as many jobs as I have had.
I think to myself that he has found
a way of holding onto what he has,
and is not, this time, letting go.

But I want to tell him what I saw there
as he fell and smacked the earth
with half of heaven's branches
crashing in on him--
something he may already suspect--
the utter indifference of air.