Who Knows Where the Time Goes - Nina Simone
Nina Simone
The Essential Nina Simone (2011)
All things hidden and rustling
Hedgerows, grasses, back of my mind
She tiptoes white-pawed through the morning.
I watch the dog, full of aesthetic admiration. Her snowy mask continues down her chest now, silver hairs in the minky fur of her back. Aged, grey little eyebrows. All animals have this, their streamlined simplicity. Exactly what and as they are. She’s perfect and strong and I imagine her insides brimming with health. Red blood cells furiously rushing. She is both old and immune because I insist on her eternal companionship.
Kayla and I bathed last year under some misting rain and the sounds of the harbour. We can be nude but never scrutinizing—you can look without seeing when you’re polite, or when the body is reduced to vessel. Talked about her pregnancy hips, my affectionately named haunches. Were animals laid out under the November sky but our limbs not as exquisite, not so purpose built. I wish I had the grace of the dog, to be blinking in a pool of light and look heaven sent. The brimming tubs had strands of my hair indenting the water, proof of weakened little follicles and faulty hormones. Sweaty impressions of ass and thigh on the sauna floor. And now as I become ever-more preoccupied with the increasing visibility of time, I find this is all I want to talk to women about. I imagine some easing of physical anxiety if I could only explain the weight and reach and sway of it all. Anticipating the hum of likewise, likewise.
Are animals this physically conscious? To be able to associate the grumbling tummy or popping knee with cause and consequence. I’ve waited for a certain thickness to permeate her rib cage—wasted concern. Instead she catapults her little body around the world, lean as ever. Restless, restless feelings. All this human claustrophobia (relentlessly inside of myself) and her abundant animal mess.
Send me, Nina.