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Plus ça Change, Plus C’est la Même Chose
Jeff Bernstein

The way our children look at us.
The way our parents studied us.
We stand in the driveway when our kids leave
listen to the stones spin and crack.

Listen to the stones spin and crack.
Do our children wonder how aging feels, joints
creaking, limits everywhere like gullies
bracketing dirt roads after a cloudburst?

Bracketing dirt roads after a cloudburst.
Think of what we didn’t do this summer.
Too late, state park gates closed,
lake’s cooled off, skim of ice coming soon.

Lake’s cooled off, skim of ice coming soon.
We can’t get it back, can only plan next year’s
garden though this one hasn’t been put to bed.
It wasn’t long ago that it was overflowing.

It wasn’t long ago that it was overflowing.
Does my oldest dog still grieve the lab
we lost eighteen months ago, spring
a brief tease for a couple afternoon minutes?

Listen to the stones spin and crack.
Bracketing dirt roads after a cloudburst.
Lake’s cooled off, skim of ice coming soon.
It wasn’t long ago that it was overflowing.

—
A lifelong New Englander, Jeff Bernstein watches the seasons slowly turn from a hillside in 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.” He is the author of two chapbooks and a full-length collection: Nightfall, Full of Light, published by Turning Point. He was Runner-Up in the 2023 Concrete Wolf Louis Poetry Book Award and received an honorable mention in the 2023 Homebound Publication Poetry Prize competition. His new collection, The Ancient Ways, will be published in 2024.

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