ANGELA TROLOVE

Hitch

You will be conveyed in manners of your wildest dreams—a dog with her snout slung through the gaping mesh behind you, a baby rosemary clod in a plastic bag shivering beside the water canister on the floor. A high roof in the back seat, a red worn cloth singing in vivid and fade.

'Is that your diary?' Yes. Or my hourly.

The future is not obscure. The future is made up of all this tangible matter right here! I caress the plastic lid of a water bottle.

I am laughing. It has been like riddle. You ask what is the future? I weed at the threat. Now, I am laughing, the future, of course, is made of cuoio and apple juice and all the things it has always been made of—poplars, bamboo, long grass in the south of France. And voices, human singersong voices I love. Raw tobacco smell.

My daily labour of describing is paying dividends—I can already describe where (I don't know) we will sleep tonight. I can describe the feelings when we are moved on or when we wake silent unattended in the mineral morning. And this is something we all have in common, if you are the polizia or the pirates—the sound of water, the way your adrenals perform, the smoothness of concrete, the behaviour of light because of sunset, the figure of broom leaves, the fur on its flowers.

I am a perceiver and you are a perceiver and from there we are believers in who knows what. Enchanted, pleased to meet with you.

Photo by Jacinta Kalsy

Angela Trolove was born in North Canterbury in 1989 and has been based in Dunedin. Travelling in Europe, she developed a strong interest in poetry found at the intersection of languages, especially between Italian and English. She regularly studies the etymology of words as a way of further understanding the culture in which she has been raised. For the past nine years Angela has collaged lyrics from magazine advertisements, working with the flexibility of words, realigning them into themes of curiosity, tenderness, or celebration. Some of these pieces formed the 2013 Dunedin exhibition ‘People are Being Understood’. She enjoys the company of both Dunedin’s Octagon Poetry Collective and the Nelson Live Poets.

Angela comments: ‘“Hitch” was my experience on a road trip from Barcelona to Dijon three years ago. I was offered a lift with a couple who I didn’t realise had just broken up, but still had to get their vehicle home to Berlin. I had not even a thin itinerary; at this stage I’d given myself only the brief to encounter many places in Europe and to do so without air travel. The arbitrariness of my direction unnerved me.

‘One afternoon worn out with this lack of agenda, out of the blue a huge sense of peace came over me, a sense of familiarity with my surroundings. This sense of relief is what I expect the poem to convey, the sense that the world around me has been and always will be made of . . .
    Grass, stones, and wood,
and the greatest of these is grass.

‘In a nutshell, there and then at age 26 I realized I was in love with the world and that I believed in the specific, non-actualized beauty of the future. In that tense road trip I heard and was cooled by rain on a vehicle’s roof leaving Spain, a sound which struck me as very familiar; incidental, but particular.’

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Links
Angela's website