Last night at the play, as the father/actor stood crying
counting the reasons he could not go on

and the friend/actress counted back
reasons to forgive death’s injustice,

I found myself thinking about who I must forgive:
my sister for dying? How can I begin.

Maybe forgiveness isn’t the right word.
Disease, I know, with its splitting cells,

in which blind tumors reel and slake their hunger,
is out of my hands, doesn’t care what I want.

What if I forgave the summer instead?
The nasturtium stems tangled in their pots,

the spikes of cardinal flower hanging
over the walk where mulberries like manna rot, vinegar-sweet.

In the branches above all manner of birds rest,
feast, sluice through the small, curling leaves, fences,

the neighborhood painted in their purple shit,
year after year. Toward the end, my sister would sit on her porch

watching the trees flutter, weighted with the thrum of all those songs,
the morning sun low, the air warming by the minute,

floating in its calm sea, insisting on the slowness
of oblivion, time out of time that inches:

sunlight on leaf, water in air, bee stumbling among
blossom, a world cast in gold, brass, green.

Don’t move, I think, barely breathe, in this moment
there is nothing broken, nothing shattered,

nothing worth your counting. Why can’t we lie?
Refuse the world that drifts, dims and pales,

the night that turns cold, covers us in frost,
that hushes us to sleep.

Clare Banks

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