Brooks ages into paradox (3 of 3)

Part 3 of a 3-part "upside-down" episode! 

This upside-down 3-part edition of TAPIT opens on a poem, and ends on a dream. When Todd knocks on a stranger’s door to deliver a poem he wrote about the occupant three years ago when he lived across the street from her, a surprising relationship unfolds. 

Transcript

B: I remember my mother one time when I was in angst about having to ask my dad whether I could go out on a date that Saturday.  And she said, just, just wait until he has had his dinner, and then you ask him, I was just furious. It's like, Dad, I want to go out on a date. I would have gotten a no. So what she was teaching me was how do I change my behavior to get what I want? so my learning level is about: how do I speak from my heart rather than from my head? 

Welcome to the final episode of Brooks’ three-part story. Make sure you're caught up on episodes one and two before listening to this one. 

Brooks and I meet again. It’s colder outside today, so the windows and the front door are closed, making her house feel less like a treehouse and more like a cabin. I’m wearing a sport coat, just to … I don’t know… show a little more respect. She opens our meeting with a gift: a little red and gold paper packet stuffed with funny money: it’s a traditional “hong bao” given at the start of Chinese New Year, for luck!  

Today, Brooks is telling me about the women in her lineage. 

I still have a piece of onion skin,   onion skin paper that's typewritten, single space list of vocabulary words that my grandmother was learning.

Her grandmother’s vocabulary list is tattered and stained. It lists words like Altruism. Proclivity. Equivocate. 

Very intellectually inclined, and yet, she got pregnant when she was 19. 

And married my grandfather, who was a womanizer, and she made the best of it. And she grew up in that time when women were dependent on men

Sophist. Virtuosity. Iconoclasm. 

And my mother probably brighter. She was, she was smarter than my dad. 

Brooks’ mother started a job in San Antonio, at a biology lab, but…

She had the job for a few months, and then then she didn't have the job anymore. And I said, Mom, what happened? She said, Well, your dad, he gripes so much about my not being home to make his lunch that I quit, and that just, it just hurts my heart, yeah, that there wasn't the zeitgeist at the time to allow to support her in saying, make your own damn sandwich. And yet, here I am, yeah, on the flip side of that, on the supported side of that, of like, oh okay, not that. Oh no, not that. And having the health and the inclination and the resources to make this up myself, yeah, 

T: to do it your way. 

B: Pretty, pretty amazing.

And I've gotten to do an incredible amount of transforming coming from that into this.

Leonine. Saturnine. Cryptic.

and I, I, I'm grateful every day for whatever it is in my genealogy that gives me the wherewithal the resources to do stuff differently from my parents and my grandparents.

Space for music

Brooks surprises me by reading me some of her own poems. I thought you should hear this one. It’s called Both. 

I live on both sides of the handcuffs, wanting the bindings and resisting the restraints, lonely without the connections, furious with compromises, both responsive to the flow and wilfully constipating it, I am aging into paradox, inelegant, authentic, tearful and filled with rage, jingling with joy and consumed by curiosity. I am sullen with choices and sulky with inabilities, goofy with stillness, silliness and gut laughing with the meaningful, meaninglessness of it all.
 
 

Our next meeting takes place at my house, for a change. If there is a friendship here (and I think there is) it’s time I tried it on, embodying it in my own space. Hila and I make a yellow curry. 

After dinner, I surprise Brooks with a gift. In the days since our last meeting, I’ve written not one, but two more poems about her.

I ask her if I can read them for her. And this time she says yes right away. 

All three poems are sonnets. Because I say so. 

They form a triptych, which I’ve titled Three for a Neighbor. 

You’ve already heard the first one: Three Weeks Across the Street from Her and I’ve Yet to See Her Face … The second one is called Three Years Go By and I Knock, but She Doesn’t Answer. 

three years go by and I knock, but she doesn't answer, and I'll have to wait to show her what I wrote about her. So I pencil out a note to clip by wooden clothespin to the wall mount mailbox on the porch and allow her lazy cat to inspect the tips of my fingers and turning to go, I let the leafing warmer than average, January breeze, which here in her front yard, seems more hers than ours, and trance me as I dream it must entrance her to with the music it makes. pursuing the live oaks racks of open paperbacks as though choosing which to savor and which to savor later when the neighborhood's quieter or the mood is right, or the light is brighter, and then I let it read me, cover to cover, poem to poem, line by line and letter by letter blow it all away for the chance to rewrite her. 

My third poem for Brooks is called Three Visits Later, and She Finally Lets Me Read it to Her… 

[recording of poem 3] three visits later, and she finally lets me read it to her in her cozy front parlor with Windows and front door closed to the cold front against which this week, her main chore has been moving all her potted plants indoors, but first there's a cup of hot water for me, and she drinks tea. And we've been getting along so comfortably, it's almost like we've known each other all this while and longer for compatible humor and candor about the late husband and the girlfriend and all that came before, so that when the time comes to end, another hour, we're hugging our farewells like friends an d making plans, and as I cross her garden again and bow beneath a low hung Bao, her Chinese New Year hong bao luck packet In my jacket pocket, I'm reminded how our arts Sing deep seeded, long rooted springtime into Our hearts.

B: This is just exquisite. I like it.  And we're hugging our farewells like friends and making plans, and as I cross her garden again and bow beneath a low hung bow her Chinese New Year hong bao luck packet in my jacket pocket, I'm reminded how our arts sing deep seated, long rooted springtime into our hearts delicious. 

It seems I’ve added three more mirrors to her collection.  

A few days later, we sit cross-legged on cushions on the floor of a Turkish restaurant. She’s brought all three poems along with her. The food is good, but the poems… she really wants to sit with me awhile and savor those poems. 

I let it read, cover to cover, poem to poem, line by line and letter by letter. Blow it all the way for the chance to re write. I knock, but she doesn't answer. That's pretty good, what I knock but she doesn't answer that kind of,that kind of speaks to this dance that we've been doing, of show me this. No, no, you show me first. 

B: You know how when a person walks by and they've got perfume on and the body's already gone and the perfume is left, that poems the reverse, it's like you smell it coming. 

T: What do you mean you did? Maybe because you have, you lived it.

B: Maybe I'm still smelling it coming like, oh my gosh, and that was the dream I had last night. 

And we end this 3-part series with an unusually vivid dream: Brooks is with a group of women, at a sort of overnight retreat – in an old house. Everyone is being assigned their rooms…

B: and I was shown to a door that opened off of the hallway, and I opened the door and was it was a closet, and it was dark and there was no windows, and I shut the door and I went To find somebody to complain to, of course, yeah. And as I was waiting for them to for the person to come so I could properly complain, I went through some of these other rooms that were available to to the women, and they all had three or four, four beds in them, and I thought, That's not for me. I'm not sleeping with anybody else. I don't want to be in a room with somebody else. So I meandered back to this closet door in the hall, and I opened it, this time I went in, and the room was wooden, much like my house is very wooden and and I noticed that there were two windows, they were covered, and then I opened them, and it was glorious outside. 

T: Okay, they had views. 

B: They had views. And then I noticed there was a door, and the door opened out onto a little patio that had that had flowers, potted flowers on it, that other people could reach from their rooms too. Was shared, but it was private. And then I noticed that on the floor there was a double bed mattress, and it had right beside it, it had a reading lights I could read when I was in bed, T: sounded ideal. 

B: And then I noticed there's a toilet there, and then there's a shower there. And then I saw as these things opened up and there's actually a tub. In other words, as I was willing to explore, slowly, my needs became met through willingness and curiosity, and that's kind of what this is all about here: I have yet to see her face, she doesn't answer, and she finally lets me read it to her. Doesn't that say pretty much everything 

Would you like a custom poem that says pretty much everything about your life? Pitch me at 808-300-0449 and tell me why. You could be my next guest. 

See that’s one of the things that I'm learning is and and energetically, what this whole planet is moving towards is community away from the male hierarchy. We're at the end of the patriarchy. 

You can read the poems from this episode, including Brooks’s poem “Both” at poeminthat.com. 

We have to work together. It's a lot of growing pains to get there. Isn't there

B: decades worth. 

We quoted from Roger Housden’s Ten Poems to Save Your Life, published by Harmony Books.

And we're just coming into some pretty heavy, heavy duty shit show stuff. 

There’s a Poem in That is written and produced by me, Todd Boss, and co-produced by Hila Plitmann. This miniseries was edited by Clare Wiley. 

And I can only think…

Music by Esh Whitacre. Ben O’Brien made it all sound seamless.

… that I'm designed to be here, that I chose to be here on the planet. I've got something to offer back at this time. We’ll see. 

If you love this episode, tell someone about it. The bigger our listenership is, the more hearts we can touch. And the more mirrors of light we can hang in the wooden rooms of dreamers everywhere. 

In other words, as I was willing to explore, 

I’m Todd Boss, reminding you… 

slowly, 

That there's a poem in everything… 

my needs became met through willingness and curiosity, 

…if you’re paying attention.

and that's kind of what this is all about here

Sound of wind chimes