Self Help: A Guide for the Retiring

By Elizabeth Poreba

For the retired and/or retiring, a personal exploration claiming to be a self-help manual, a poet's musings on the experience of no longer having much to do and being disinclined by shyness to join a book club.

Life could become a summer afternoon, a slow swim in a warm lake. I could become another backyard roustabout, part of the greedy gang eying the vegetable garden. The larcenous woodchuck returns. We exchange a long gaze but he gives no clue of what to do next.

The poems ponder various ways to adapt to unaccustomed leisure--napping, complaining, gardening, volunteering, and so on. Observing time's curious way of intermittently sprinting then lollygagging, and understanding more clearly every day that time doesn't exist anyway, the poet relishes moments, which are

… liable to be caught
like a leaf in the eddy of a brook, lodged
only long enough to look,

and which become her subjects.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Dec 13, 2017
• ISBN: 9781498246309

Elizabeth Poreba

Elizabeth Poreba taught English in New York City high schools for thirty-five years and now volunteers as a docent at the Old Merchant's House in Manhattan, a tutor of conversational English at New York University, and a foot soldier for the Sierra Club. She has published a chapbook, The Family Calling (2011). Her poems have appeared in Ducts.org, First Literary Review East and Commonweal, among other print and online publications.

Book preview

9781532619755.kindle.jpg

Self Help

A Guide for the Retiring

Elizabeth Poreba

2237.png

Self Help

A Guide for the Retiring

Copyright © 2017 Elizabeth Poreba. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Resource Publications

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199

W.

8

th Ave., Suite

3

Eugene, OR

97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-1975-5

hardcover isbn: 978-1-4982-4631-6

ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-4630-9

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgements

I.

Fissures

Leaving Thessaloniki

Sister Ghost

Feast of St. Phillip

Aubade

The Boxer at the Met

Retiring the Red Pen

On Being Asked How are you?

My Condition

Break

The More We Are Ourselves, The Less Self in Us

Gems

Passed On

Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 61

Retiring Is Not Retreating

II.

Letter to a Distant Daughter

Moisés and Nicholas

The Parable of the Vineyard

A Good Rain

Stern

Style

Perspective

Afternoon Nap

The Land of Shades Gives Birth

California Light

Where Were the Dogs in Eden?

February Thaw

A Walk in the Back Lot

How Does the Rushing Brook Sound?

Yellow-Crowned Night Heron

Split

Cozumel

Ornamental

III.

Self Help

Détente

Feast of the Holy Guardian Angels

The Butterfly Effect

My Approach

Rest Room

Seaside

Carlos

Dance

Anniversary #44

Sparrow

Not Everything Known is Learned

Tourists

Verde Que Te Quiero Verde

Root Room

A Miracle

Forecast

Tompkins Square Park

Notes

Acknowledgements

Boomer Lit: Fissures and Tourists

Canary: February Thaw

Ducts: Yellow-Crowned Night Heron

Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion: "Feast of St.