POOL GAMES

A long phone conversation with my youngest daughter;

It doesn’t often happen.

She has a troubled life that I can’t fix,

A failure I regret now and in the past,

And I feel guilty for her unhappiness.

So mostly I listen and offer benign advice,

Which she knows doesn’t count for much.

But we understand that it’s better than nothing.

Then she recalls a long ago Sunday morning

Before her mother and I divorced.

She was five or six. Her sister and brother not much older.

All of us joyous playing in our sun-filled backyard swimming pool.

I throw her and her siblings into the cyan water.

“Toss us higher daddy,” they beg, their deeply tanned bodies

Darting like little otters.

Happy times my daughter remembers. I remember.

And we laugh remembering then,

Forgetting now.