late summer in saltillo valley and the cotton fields spoof and
sprawl, and all you can see for miles are the clean, unpicked boles –
white and purse-lipped as newly declared saints. we bounce in the
back of the pickup and we are poor and the road sputters with potholes,
gray dust rising behind us – lonely, spectral and following us home,
like a stray. I have never picked cotton before – you tell me that you
will show me how and I do not think that it will be all that
difficult.
I am given a
great canvas bag which, unrolled, sags to my feet – I sling it around my
shoulders. the boles of cotton are frazzled and white and shaking a little
like white-gowned patients after their shock therapy. asylum, lunatics,
they whisper under their sheets and a few stray bees hover, indecisive
and nearsighted. the shuck of the bole crinkles, and you need to untangle
little black seeds from their cotton slips, like some crouching ape
picking for nits.
the larger cottonplants are lazy and wide-mouthed and loud, like madames
cooing over their houseful of whores. I can see you a few rows in front of me,
bent, sleeves rolled up to display your slender perfect wrists and I love you so much
in that moment and I wonder if I will ever be able to love you like that again.
you pick very quickly. the earth is hard and cracked like dropped china
and the people picking with us in the cotton field are distant and wavery,
faint transmissions, their backs bent, and then rising to stretch every once in a while
and to look up at the clouds, big and ribbed, like oxenless covered wagons west.
I think
that if I had to pick cotton for the rest of my life
that my hands would be very good and very rough
and that I would grow eccentric and godless, like the cottonboles,
with only a handful of black teeth and with you by my side
and only ever smiling, smiling, skin parting and crinkling.
