Where Miss Welty sat too nearly every evening for seventy years
As the darkness descended like a dress, she said, and then a glass
Of bourbon with which to watch the evening news, grace and evil
Delivered right to the house, and ice from the narrow refrigerator
Where once a friend stored an owl, and then maybe some old jazz
Records, or a book from one of the teetering towers everywhere,
When I was a child I thought books were mere natural wonders
Coming up like grass, or maybe the last letter of the day hammered
On that ancient typewriter, she finally got an electric typewriter but
Noted tartly that all it ever seemed to say was hurry up hurry up
Or maybe just sitting late on the porch inhaling the pines and roses
And cedars and magnolias and last murmurs of the mockingbirds,
And thinking about her mom and dad and brother, all long gone,
Who gave her the cool room upstairs because she was the only girl
And here she is many years later, let’s say a night when she’s eighty
Wandering around laying pages on the rug or the bed or the table
To find the shape and bone of the story, its smell and its weight,
Finding out the thing that matters with a story of any kind at all,
Where is the voice coming from? And there have been so many
Braided voices in this house and this head. Memory is a living thing,
She thinks, rattling the ice in her glass just to interest the wary owls
Up in the redolent myrtles and pines. As we remember we discover,
And my memory is my dearest treasure. She thinks of the young
Interviewer who was here this morning from the college newspaper.
The girl who asked, what was it like to have led such a sheltered life?
And Miss Welty smiles and shivers her ice one last time and says aloud
To the mockingbirds and owls and reporters and readers and scholars
A sheltered life can be a daring life, as a daring life comes from within,
And steps inside and closes the door and, humming, heads to bed.