Winter Cotton

by mallory chambliss

Time past, the chisel to memory, recalls but a ripple of its former clarity—a pause in a cotton field.

Sopping wet ground from overnight rain set against a rose-colored sky, where low clouds light on the horizon in dull winter glow.

Cotton tufts left to shake on stalk in the brash winter wind of a Georgian field; White, forgotten boll, too un-green, to be of any earthly plant; Brown husks of summer past, wildly nodding rattles;

Romantic imagining, that is just that—a silhouetted, fat farmer tilling the dark Georgian soil in some flat valley. No weeds, just man’s fashioning of airy rows between sharp lines of dried cotton plants, equidistance, amid the rich, dark soil; Miles of tilled soil stretching like this, as if it were earth’s last feature; As if, walked into, the expanse quick transforms to an enveloping habitat to world’s end.

Black crows, convening kings of this domain, chatter over a dead rat, in an intelligent cacophony of primate-like yaups; Shuffling field mice, making, heard not seen, the earth seem to vibrate and shiver.

Soups of commingling nitrates, phosphates, algae, and bacteria stagnate in the hazy light of low-laid pools; Rain-torn, wind-stretched, and splayed, pure white strands of cotton, smudged there by mud, appear more as sloppy trash than nature’s fiber on bare ground; Shredded black tire, exposed here and there, by the plow’s soft action; Peppered, white and colored plastic bits, blown or dragged, artifacts of a once useful means.

Unclear this memory—no year to mark its birth, no extraordinary event to exclaim its being; Served up, a mystical offering, as the mind’s fog bank shifts to allow fleeting objects to form and fade.