The Timekeeper
Perched high into the tipping edge, I hold the past at arms length and breathe air and bones into stones into sea. The ground spits out time and seeps into me with the sea almost vertical and me falling into. Three two one spin repeat and same sun on skin all the while. I pull out the colour of these long light days. Of holding still in this spring turning heat.
One night I help a woman get into the hot dark water and it pulls us both down.
One night I balance on a sand dune trying to catch the bodies of babies throwing themselves off the edge towards the water.
One night I stand by a river and watch a woman tied to a tree who is hiding, but I know her dog will bark and give her away.
Rhiannon Inman-Simpson, I bite into a red morning sun rising, 2025.
A friend leads me to a large tree standing by itself in a field and I stand very close to it, face right up to the trunk. There are holes in the tree which ooze golden sticky sap and out of that sap pink blossom is growing and I know that the blossom shouldn’t be there. Wasps swarm in and out all around the flowers and I am too close to it all, to the sap and the blossom and the wasps. I wake up with this feeling of both disgust and beauty heavy in my body which I can’t shake. The paintings I make in the following weeks are flooded in green and pink, neon and muddy and glowing and sweet and sickly. It feels important, but I don’t know why.
Red flesh and bitter sweet I bite into a red morning sun rising. The bruises on my legs are a tender yellow quickly spreading purple but I scoop the apples gently in my palm and pile them softly into the crate. I remember not to bruise the apples. Circling the trees I weave in and out and up and down, body in motion every hour of light I feel the physicality of each tree in my limbs. The slow-going overgrown ones on a grey tangled morning of nettles and scratches with a dull yellow ache in my lower back. The bright and breezy easy plucking reds of a blue sky day with a tight shoulder from reaching up too high. A hornet sting shocked me out of my rhythm and brought the feelings of the tree dream from months ago to the surface. That feeling of being too close, the sticky fear of reaching into unknowns.
One night I cut off another woman’s hands in order to save myself.
One night I give birth, but there is no pain and no baby and I’m not sure if it really happened at all.
One night I watch a whale trapped in a reservoir but I am too afraid to set it free.
In the black air night I sit amongst the trees all in a line. The watchful one is with me, the one I can’t focus on but who stays close by. She is the timekeeper. We sit together, quiet and expectant, until out of the black green grows up and out and falls in ripples of light, surrounding us on all sides. In front of us the ground opens up into black void paralysis panic and there is a staircase leading down. Between the green I watch a man in the distance slowly walk towards us. He is all shadow, made of night and I know that the only way out is down.
In the blue intensity between squalls the sea is darkened by the wind pushing it eastwards against the light. I light-footed almost run down the cliffs, no stopping, pushed along by the howling wind and howling sun. I follow my shadow home.
Rhiannon Inman-Simpson, The timekeeper, 2025.
