CP Wilson
CREATIVE NONFICTION
This all takes place in the blue shade of a Spanish oak, on a blanket bandaged over a scab of dried dirt where even the bunchgrass refuses to grow, near a small strand of saplings growing at bent angles, their limbs stretching towards thin wisps of mote-laden light, & when she asks have you ever wondered what it would feel like to be such a small tree, to be so fragile that even a shadow could kill you, you don’t answer right away because as long as there’s this silence, as long as she’s waiting for an answer, she’ll keep her cloud-sky colored eyes focused on you & you can stare at her, study the crease-lines that form when she smiles, wonder how deep you’ve worn yourself into her skin, wonder how many more times you’ll get to see that smile, & she’s only smiling right now because you’re making that face, the one you can only make when you’re sitting on a patchwork blanket & the sharp side of an acorn is corkscrewing into your ass & when you lean forward, she leans forward too & suddenly your faces are coming together & her hand is in your hair & you’ve got one arm braced against her knee while you slip your other hand up her blouse & touch her breast as if it were the pale-blue underside of a flame, except we both know this story isn’t about you, it’s about me, & when I lean forward, she turns her head and my wet lips press against her dry cheek & it reminds me of the first night, full of frog noise & night breath, when I brought her to this tree and the sky above us looked like a scattered handful of hen-seed & she pointed & named the moons of Saturn: Caliban, Sycorax, Setebos, Prospero, they sounded like super-villains, & if she was lying I had no way to know & I wouldn’t have cared anyway because we were on our backs next to each other, not touching, but so close I could feel the heat coming off her body & I knew that if I could make the hair on my arm stand that I might brush against her, but sometimes your body won’t listen, sometimes, when you’re laying under the night sky you feel less like a person & more like a body of water & you’re trying to reflect it all back, but it’s all bouncing back distorted because you can’t stop rippling & shimmering & you’re just hoping that a tree will dip a muddy root into you & drink, & I say you, except we both know this story is still about me, we both know I’m the broken oak & the tilted trees & the slow ebbing night, we both know, in the end, nothing ends.
“The simple fact of the matter is that truth operates differently in poetry. The same way in which time is a relative depending on gravitational pull, truth is relative depending upon genre. When we read a news report, we expect the facts as they happen. When we read non-fiction, we accept that there’s some level of inexactness to dialogue or sequence of events. And when we read poetry, what we’re observing is an impressionistic depiction of the truth. The same way in which Monet and Renoir painted with the shifting light, poetry is an amalgamation of experiences distilled into a single moment of truth. Did we sit under that tree? Yes. Did we have a conversation? Yes. Did I shimmer and reflect it all back? Hopefully”