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Self Help
A Guide for the Retiring
Elizabeth Poreba
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. 8th 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.
Acknowledgements
Boomer Lit: “Fissures” and “Tourists”
Canary: “February Thaw”
Ducts: “Yellow-Crowned Night Heron”
Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion: “Feast of St. Philip”
Limestone: “A Walk in the Back Lot”
Mom Egg Review: “Passed On”
Mudfish: “Feast of the Holy Guardian Angels”
Time of Singing: “Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 61”
Written River: “Verde Que Te Quiero Verde”
Among the many indignities of aging is the irresistible temptation to reach for some menu of bromides and convey to the world those invaluable lessons about living.
—Laura Kipnis
I
Fissures
I’m made of words mostly.
The rest is thin.
Words hold me up
like bones beneath the skin.
The thought of a soul within
is mute or moot
and slides in a vowel shift
from silent to irrelevant.
Perhaps such accidents
of sound are not mere
motions of the tongue.
I ponder them as seers once
studied fissures in burned bone.
Leaving Thessaloniki
I would leave, but the farmers have closed the airport.
Besides, they have a story around here
About a mother and daughter parting
And it doesn’t turn out well
From the mother’s point of view.
They have circled the airport with their green tractors,
And they look like reliable men,
Worried like their saints.
Why should they pay taxes?
These changes are probably not for the better.
I would leave if they opened the airport,
Though how fair is it that I
Should go and never know
The color of the tight buds
I first saw a week ago?
I would leave, but I can’t.
Why should we part, anyway?
Farmers here keep their families close.
They build walls around their compounds
And include chickens and a vegetable garden.
Sundays, I’d set a table outside,
We’d eat and listen to the chickens mutter
About the boredom of staying together.
Sister Ghost
for Gertrude Tredwell of 29 East 4th Street, 1840–1933
In the favored front room, in Father’s bed,
windows papered to keep out cold,
she lay ready to die to the Kingdom
as she’d been told, propped on feathers plucked
from geese of bygone feasts, remembering
the great china platter, grace intoned
before meals, also perhaps graces
she had missed, the drapes always drawn
to spare the furniture from the sun.
It was hers at the last, the stately parlor,
the marble stoop pocked by coal ash,
the triple friezes belting the high ceilings
and the columns on Father’s fine wardrobe,
temple to the camphor-scented topcoat,
the opera hat and folded cravats.
Even when the charming nephew died
she continued to preside, imperial,
object of rumors of wealth and madness,
living past the money until rot took the
