Carole Stone,
English professor emerita, Montclair State University, has published five chapbooks of poetry, her most recent being More Sweet, More Salt (Finishing Line Press), and a volume of poetry, Lime and Salt (Carriage House Press). Her poetry book, Traveling with the Dead, is forthcoming from Backwaters Press.
She received Fellowships to Hawthornden Castle International Writers Retreat, Scotland, to Chateau de Lavigny, Switzerland and the Rothermere Institute of American Studies, Oxford University, England.
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Outside the Frame
1.
In Hopper’s The Bootleggers, three men in black
rain slickers power their white skiff
toward a figure standing in front
of a gabled house, almost lost.
They might well be my uncles,
evading the Coast Guard
in quiet Jersey inlets. The one
sketched in on shore,
the sky blank above him,
could be my father,
his whiskey trucks
outside the frame.
2.
In his Tables for Ladies, a waitress
leans over a row of grapefruit near
a blackboard with specials. The cashier
leans an elbow on the glass
cigar counter. Stiff as mannequins,
a couple, stare across their table,
as my parents might have. Maybe
he’ll buy a cigar, bite off the end
and then light it, flirt with the cashier,
while she makes change.
None of them knows
what will happen next.
3.
In other paintings, there’s the artist’s wife
again and again. We glimpse his model
by herself; in a theatre box reading the program;
seated on a bed gazing from a motel room;
seen through a brownstone’s window,
wearing a red slip, bare shoulders white.
Wherever her husband set up his easel,
a woman alone and not alone.
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