Cotton fields like snow as far as I can see, and if I squint maybe I can look back in your stories to you on a blanket, too young to feel someone else’s someday soft shirt tear up your fingers like your brothers and sisters. Too young for the future featherweight fabric to bend your back like your parents.
I shake when I drive through the cotton fields. I feel them in my bones like ancestral memories, like your bones inside of me, dense as dry rotted cotton and coming apart. I’ll take whatever is left just to keep a part of you in me.
Every time I cross that great canal I tell anyone who will listen about you, no matter whether they’d heard the story before. How shocked they were to ask after the boat’s captain and to see a boy step forward. I tell them how you sailed out of there, chasing your brother halfway around the world in a tugboat, but never found him. If I wander my way across the Pacific will you be there waiting on me, another story on the tip of your tongue?
Do you still keep a comb in your shirt pocket? You’d pull it out and run it through your hair, and I could see you leaning back on the hood of the car, outside the bar, watching girls go by. She never let you finish telling those stories, but they left your eyes sparkling and lips grinning.
If I find the right cotton field,
If I wander the right route across the ocean,
If I comb my hair and smile just right,
will I find you there waiting on me, another story on the tip of your tongue?
Or is my inheritance the ache in your brittle bones and your finally faded smile?