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Posts Tagged ‘recording’

When Bert Sends Me an Mp4

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on October 29, 2025| 6 Comments »


 
 
Though she’s been dead more than a year,
Donna sings to me through the recording,
her voice bold as she belts into Ladder Canyon
a song of celebration and goodbye.
The cancer by then was a longtime companion.
She laughs as the lyrics bounce off of sandstone,
and then she starts leaving space for listening:
And all I’ve done      (   I’ve done      I’ve done  )
for want of wit      (  of wit      of wit   ).
When the first verse is sung, she exclaims,
“That was fantastic!” Years later, the echo
resounds, though it comes in the sound
of my own voice pealing around my own room,
“That was fantastic!”  I shout back. And it was.
Fantastic to feel her again in the drums of my ears,
in the hum of my throat, in the thrum of my blood.
Fantastic to hear her singing those words we have sung
together how many thousands of times. But this time,
Donna’s not singing to blend. She’s shouting it out
like a shanty, haunted by shadows and lit up by life.
I’m so stunned by her voice, I don’t even try to sing along.
I absorb every wave of her, as if I could take her all in
and not have to give her back to death.
I play it again and again. Every time, I echo back,
“That was fantastic.” And by that, I mean the echo
in the canyon. I mean the song. I mean the gift
of hearing her voice again. Fantastic. I mean her life.
Fantastic. I mean her. I mean her. I mean her.

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