Lightning-hearted I take to the roam, the wound and all healing ahead. The East is enough, its distance and distances. I aspire to the instability of sand, its disobedience, how it runs away from the present the way light does. I’m reading about Eskimos, how they walk a straight line east to scatter their anger on the plain, then go home to their lover, their dinner. Their fundamental sense of purpose. I walk the line. I walk on the wild side, sugar. I walk to scatter my wishes through wild grass and up to my armpits in cow parsley, the path entirely lost in this green and sentient lush. No one returns the same way. The rain is an upturned well for the wants you don’t know you have. I am filled with them. I walk towards them. Like a nightingale, I migrate at night, and the males sing too late to call me down from the sky. I go too far to hope of return, if hope is what this feeling is.
‘The Peripatetic in Love’ appears in Angelina D’Roza’s debut collection Envies the Birds. Listen to Angelina D’Roza reading this poem:
Longbarrow Press 