The Welty Tour
In the next room, Peter’s gloved hands crack
cordoned-off spines: he has been granted
permission, his agent’s call his pedigree.
So the tour itself is only the docent and me.
He is docile, eager to please, leads me
up the stairs and takes me to the bed.
The coverlet is authentic, he says.
He lectures me on the heating system, offers
an anecdote of a broken casserole, recites
all of the Welty lore he has rehearsed.
She taught him when he was young, and now
he serves her legend, lets me lean in
toward the books—I cross the line
of what’s allowed, never touching.
He shows me photos—two loves lost, one
a married man—then on the way down,
pauses before a feather in a box,
reciting Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan.”
He begins to weep at Let her drop, adds,
Like Welty’s loves! Now I stop—
is he comparing her to the god, or Leda?
He cannot bear her, her Unfulfilled Love.
I cannot bear this either—how dare he conjure up
for her such disappointment, such wasted longing?
I want to be the mirror of her photographs,
to be her figure of my own conjuring. I want
to believe I, too, could be happy here, in this
solitary house, in this small town, amidst
the rows and stacks of books. Untouched.
Rebecca Morgan Frank, "The Welty Tour" from Sometimes We’re All Living in a Foreign Country. Copyright © 2017 by Rebecca Morgan Frank. Reprinted by permission of Carnegie Mellon University Press.
