What’s Missing by Jeff Bernstein

Why does it bother him so much that the glasses,
bowls, silverware and other accoutrements
are not put back in their proper places
at his mother’s apartment?  She doesn’t even notice
that the good silver is missing, he took that months ago,
getting ready for this next phase, they are just waiting
for the next shoe to drop, how many shoes can drop,
planning seems futile, coping, telling fiblets
about all he can hope for. Meanwhile, the cocktail glasses
are AWOL somewhere in the kitchen, the stock
of the highballs in the liquor cabinet dwindling.
It takes several visits to see what’s not there –
that old adage about how it was impossible
to prove a negative withers like the unwatered plants.

The path on the headlands gets rockier and rockier
as I clamber down, waves from the North Atlantic
pound the shore in an endless long-distance parade.

A lifelong New Englander, Jeff Bernstein divides his time between Boston and Central Vermont. Poetry is his favorite and earliest art form (he can’t draw a whit or hold a tune). He would most have liked to have been, like Thoreau, “an inspector of snow-storms and rain-storms… [a] surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes.” Recent poems have appeared, or will shortly, in, among others, Allegro Poetry Magazine, Best Indie Lit New England, The Centrifugal Eye, Cooweescoowee, Edison Literary Review, Grasslimb, The Kerf, The Midwest Quarterly, Mulberry Fork Review, Paper Nautilus, Pinyon, Plum Tree Tavern, Reckless Writing Poetry Anthology, Rockhurst Review, Silkworm and Tipton Poetry Journal.  He is the author of two chapbooks; his full-length collection “Nightfall, Full of Light” was published in December 2017 by Turning Point. His writer's blog is at www.hurricanelodge.com.