twelve simple songs
DESCRIPTION
photos and poems by Dave BontaTRANSCRIPT
![Page 1: Twelve Simple Songs](https://reader033.vdocuments.us/reader033/viewer/2022042514/568c53991a28ab4916bb76b6/html5/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Twelve Simple Songs
![Page 2: Twelve Simple Songs](https://reader033.vdocuments.us/reader033/viewer/2022042514/568c53991a28ab4916bb76b6/html5/thumbnails/2.jpg)
![Page 3: Twelve Simple Songs](https://reader033.vdocuments.us/reader033/viewer/2022042514/568c53991a28ab4916bb76b6/html5/thumbnails/3.jpg)
Twelve Simple Songs
photos & poems by
Dave Bonta
![Page 4: Twelve Simple Songs](https://reader033.vdocuments.us/reader033/viewer/2022042514/568c53991a28ab4916bb76b6/html5/thumbnails/4.jpg)
![Page 5: Twelve Simple Songs](https://reader033.vdocuments.us/reader033/viewer/2022042514/568c53991a28ab4916bb76b6/html5/thumbnails/5.jpg)
for Rachel
![Page 6: Twelve Simple Songs](https://reader033.vdocuments.us/reader033/viewer/2022042514/568c53991a28ab4916bb76b6/html5/thumbnails/6.jpg)
![Page 7: Twelve Simple Songs](https://reader033.vdocuments.us/reader033/viewer/2022042514/568c53991a28ab4916bb76b6/html5/thumbnails/7.jpg)
The long A of your name had sounded in my ear for years. I looked for you in leaves & found you among needles. I looked for you on foot & found you among the bees, golden with the dust of unseen blooms.
![Page 8: Twelve Simple Songs](https://reader033.vdocuments.us/reader033/viewer/2022042514/568c53991a28ab4916bb76b6/html5/thumbnails/8.jpg)
![Page 9: Twelve Simple Songs](https://reader033.vdocuments.us/reader033/viewer/2022042514/568c53991a28ab4916bb76b6/html5/thumbnails/9.jpg)
My parachute knapsack held only paper & instructions in several languages for folding origami wings. I even had to supply my own shadow for a welcoming committee. That's what it was like being alone.
![Page 10: Twelve Simple Songs](https://reader033.vdocuments.us/reader033/viewer/2022042514/568c53991a28ab4916bb76b6/html5/thumbnails/10.jpg)
![Page 11: Twelve Simple Songs](https://reader033.vdocuments.us/reader033/viewer/2022042514/568c53991a28ab4916bb76b6/html5/thumbnails/11.jpg)
While others were playing house I was playing hermitage. Trains blew their whistles by day & by night. You were in Africa, waking to the music of car horns & hornbills. Had I tuned into the World Service in the wee hours, I might've heard your stories about the fall of that dictator from Malawi whose last name so resembled my own.
![Page 12: Twelve Simple Songs](https://reader033.vdocuments.us/reader033/viewer/2022042514/568c53991a28ab4916bb76b6/html5/thumbnails/12.jpg)
![Page 13: Twelve Simple Songs](https://reader033.vdocuments.us/reader033/viewer/2022042514/568c53991a28ab4916bb76b6/html5/thumbnails/13.jpg)
When we first became acquainted, you were living next door to that Dorothy who disappeared into a tornado. Your own witch was dead but not by much. I wrote you a poem because I don't believe in spells or prayers; it was all I had.
![Page 14: Twelve Simple Songs](https://reader033.vdocuments.us/reader033/viewer/2022042514/568c53991a28ab4916bb76b6/html5/thumbnails/14.jpg)
![Page 15: Twelve Simple Songs](https://reader033.vdocuments.us/reader033/viewer/2022042514/568c53991a28ab4916bb76b6/html5/thumbnails/15.jpg)
In the first photo I saw, you were frowning & looking down, unruly hair the color of petals on a sunflower. You were barely there. But through medication & meditation you turned slowly toward the light.
![Page 16: Twelve Simple Songs](https://reader033.vdocuments.us/reader033/viewer/2022042514/568c53991a28ab4916bb76b6/html5/thumbnails/16.jpg)
![Page 17: Twelve Simple Songs](https://reader033.vdocuments.us/reader033/viewer/2022042514/568c53991a28ab4916bb76b6/html5/thumbnails/17.jpg)
The first time we met in the flesh you were a flash of bright laughter at the end of the table where we all convened for coffee in Montreal. Two years later, in Brooklyn, you glowed with secret knowledge & stretched like a cat in the dog-day heat.
![Page 18: Twelve Simple Songs](https://reader033.vdocuments.us/reader033/viewer/2022042514/568c53991a28ab4916bb76b6/html5/thumbnails/18.jpg)
![Page 19: Twelve Simple Songs](https://reader033.vdocuments.us/reader033/viewer/2022042514/568c53991a28ab4916bb76b6/html5/thumbnails/19.jpg)
Three years after that, I was a guest in your London home, though like a tortoise I brought my own sturdy carapace. Your house buzzed with so much activity, both joyful & clamorous, that soon my shell began to hum.
![Page 20: Twelve Simple Songs](https://reader033.vdocuments.us/reader033/viewer/2022042514/568c53991a28ab4916bb76b6/html5/thumbnails/20.jpg)
![Page 21: Twelve Simple Songs](https://reader033.vdocuments.us/reader033/viewer/2022042514/568c53991a28ab4916bb76b6/html5/thumbnails/21.jpg)
Now our words & likenesses fly through fiber-optic cables under the Atlantic. They must pass each other without knowing it, deformed as they are into carrier waves, broken as they are into pulses of light—enough to build an entire lost continent.
![Page 22: Twelve Simple Songs](https://reader033.vdocuments.us/reader033/viewer/2022042514/568c53991a28ab4916bb76b6/html5/thumbnails/22.jpg)
![Page 23: Twelve Simple Songs](https://reader033.vdocuments.us/reader033/viewer/2022042514/568c53991a28ab4916bb76b6/html5/thumbnails/23.jpg)
From time to time there's a high-pitched chirping & you say it must be from the slime-eels nibbling on the cable & tying their unbearably slick bodies into knots.
![Page 24: Twelve Simple Songs](https://reader033.vdocuments.us/reader033/viewer/2022042514/568c53991a28ab4916bb76b6/html5/thumbnails/24.jpg)
![Page 25: Twelve Simple Songs](https://reader033.vdocuments.us/reader033/viewer/2022042514/568c53991a28ab4916bb76b6/html5/thumbnails/25.jpg)
We've been meeting in this disembodied placethe world-wide web so long, levitating like Himalayan lamas, it's tempting to wonder whether we even need the ground. Don't the Irish say the road will rise up to meet us? Let's drink to that, each raising our part of the universal solution so our glasses belly up to our webcams for the clink, each blocking our view of the other's eyes—a pale or stout substitute for those blues.
![Page 26: Twelve Simple Songs](https://reader033.vdocuments.us/reader033/viewer/2022042514/568c53991a28ab4916bb76b6/html5/thumbnails/26.jpg)
![Page 27: Twelve Simple Songs](https://reader033.vdocuments.us/reader033/viewer/2022042514/568c53991a28ab4916bb76b6/html5/thumbnails/27.jpg)
I have four blankets on my bed: one is the color of a winter sky, one is the color of the river, one is the color of the Atlantic ocean and one is the color of your eyes. Lying under my four blue blankets I am warm, too warm, I pitch and roll—not like a plane in a pocket of turbulence, not like a salmon fighting the current, not like a buoy in a storm, but like a piece of grit exiled in a drop of clear salt water from the blue of your eyes.
![Page 28: Twelve Simple Songs](https://reader033.vdocuments.us/reader033/viewer/2022042514/568c53991a28ab4916bb76b6/html5/thumbnails/28.jpg)
![Page 29: Twelve Simple Songs](https://reader033.vdocuments.us/reader033/viewer/2022042514/568c53991a28ab4916bb76b6/html5/thumbnails/29.jpg)
We play a game called Mouth & Ear: one speaks, the other listens. It's simple. If your words are trees, mine are finches,vagrant & garrulous. In the nest of your ear their fledglings sprout fletching. If my words are fish, yours are lures, marvels of ingenuity— a water-bound being's dream of flight. I rise to the ring of ripples, your radiant ear.
![Page 30: Twelve Simple Songs](https://reader033.vdocuments.us/reader033/viewer/2022042514/568c53991a28ab4916bb76b6/html5/thumbnails/30.jpg)
VIA NEGATIVA PRESSPlummer's Hollow, Pennsylvania
March 2013
See http://davebonta.com/twelve-simple-songs/to view, download or order this collection in other formats,
including a film version.
This is a free cultural worklicensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
![Page 31: Twelve Simple Songs](https://reader033.vdocuments.us/reader033/viewer/2022042514/568c53991a28ab4916bb76b6/html5/thumbnails/31.jpg)
![Page 32: Twelve Simple Songs](https://reader033.vdocuments.us/reader033/viewer/2022042514/568c53991a28ab4916bb76b6/html5/thumbnails/32.jpg)