EPISODE 10/11/12: Brooks ages into paradox
- toddbosspoet4
- Apr 9
- 3 min read
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 friendship unfolds.
TODD SAYS
I’m not in the habit of poetry-bombing my neighbors, but something about the poem I wrote three years ago about an elderly gardener compelled me to share it with the person who inspired it. Turns out, Brooks is not only an avid poetry reader, but a kindred spirit.
It started with a note on her mailbox, and it ended with not one but three poems, (plus an extra one, "Both," written by Brooks herself!) and an unusually vivid dream.
I wonder how many more doors poetry could open in our neighborhoods and our hearts, if we let it.
I’m so grateful to my newfound friend Brooks for welcoming me through her screen door and entrusting her stories, intimacies, and many kindnesses to me.
BROOKS SAYS
"...a surprise beginning, some brief trust bumps, and the sweet, steady unfolding of a friendship based on curiosity, respect, vulnerability and the life force energy of poems."
Three for a Neighbor
Three Weeks Across the Street from Her and I’ve Yet to See Her Face
because she’s either rump-up rummaging weeds
from flower patches or sun-bonneted pushing an
electric mower over a square of garden-crowded
lawn or shielded under the standing-seam eave of
her front porch eating dinner from a plate on her
lap or fully enwrapped as she is on this and every
Sunday afternoon in the cocoon of the hempen
hammock she hangs in like some sort of silkworm
suspended end to end from the lower branches of
her live oak which owing to its worthy genes and
old age and a bowed carriage and its easy spread
shares its earthy aromas and shady deeps with
all of us grateful neighbors and strangers and sleeps.
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
entrance me as I dream it must entrance her too
with the music it makes perusing the live-oak’s 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.
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’s
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 these three years 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 and
making plans and as I cross her garden again and bow
beneath a low hung bough her Chinese New Year hongbao
luck packet in my jacket pocket I’m reminded how our arts
sing deep seeded long rooted springtime into our hearts.
Brooks's poem, "Both"
both
i live on both sides of the handcuffs,
wanting the bindings and
resisting the restraints.
lonely without the connections
furious with the compromises.
both responsive to the flow and
willfully 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 silliness, and
gut-laughing
with the meaningful meaninglessness of it all.
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