Dannye Romine Powell
Poetry
Dannye Romine Powell’s fourth collection (2015) is Nobody Calls Me Darling Anymore from Press 53. Her poems have appeared over the years in Prairie Schooner, Poetry, Ploughshares, Gettysburg Review, The Georgia Review, Tar River and many others. She’s won fellowships in poetry from the NEA, the NC Arts Council, and Yaddo. She has spent most of her career as a reporter and book review editor for the Charlotte (NC) Observer. She is also the author of Parting the Curtains: Interviews with Southern Writers, which includes conversations on the creative process with William Styron, Walker Percy, Pat Conroy, Eudora Welty, Shelby Foote, and many others.
Early Autumn
the room this morning
as if it meant to settle,
its soft roaming smoothing
all the frays. You
might not have noticed,
over there in your chair,
your face deep
in yesterday’s news,
but as you read, I watched you
grow younger, plumper, restored
in the beneficent glow.
I lay in bed and waited for you
to look up, hoping
you would see me
as I saw you.
But you read on
and on and too soon,
my love, the old room brightened
and we became again
exactly who we are.
“ ‘Early Autumn’ is a poem about aging with the man you love, a man who often has his nose either in the newspaper or in his Smartphone. ”
Tourist Season
who clogged our South Florida beaches
every February. Way too early
for the natives to venture into the ocean.
But these women—aging widows,
we supposed, escaping ice and snow—
had scrimped months for this trip
and they were getting wet.
We watched them
wade out—ankles, knees, thighs—
splashing arms, shoulders, necks
until, at last, they were submerged—one
with the dark welter of sea.
In my dream last night, I saw
those long-ago women bobbing
in the ocean, working arms and legs
to keep from going under. One called
my name—though I could barely hear—
and waved for me to swim on out.
I stood on the shore, unable to move
my legs, unable to state my fear.
“ ‘Tourist Season,’ I suppose, is another poem about aging. I believe the image of those women bobbing in the ocean came to me in a dream or either as I was waking. The ending of the poem was a big surprise, which is how I’d like all my poems to end. ”