Against My Better Judgment

Against my better judgment
I tried to keep you safe
with love and promises;
with storm windows
not nearly thick enough, the glass
beaten senseless by the same rain storm
that’s been beating down
for years.

In the backyard, a childhood
lingers; remembering
my plastic frog pool catching wind,
taking off, a rolling dime
tearing through the backyards.
He ran, with longer hair then, and a
promise that was never kept—
not that day, not the day they were divorced,
not the day I broke down on both knees
begging
with a broken heart.

So when you tell me you are afraid
in the quiet dark of Saturday night, I
do the one thing that would have given me
more than any word could,
and I hold you as if my own life
depended on it.

But in that strange embrace
I think of my father, the things that have been
lost, that were never owned.
Is it a burden to believe that everything
is possible?
I never saw that pool again and I couldn’t
tell you one dream I had
then
that came true.

All I have are these arms, sometimes so thin, so
shaky, but I tried
to wrap them around us both. I tried
to grow roots,
something we could climb for years; something
to protect us from the storms we would
unknowingly begin spiraling toward
one another.
If only

they could.