Illustration © Helen Nicholson
Revenant
(Giro d’Italia, 1937; Stage 16, Vittorio Veneto–Merano)
High day in the Dolomites,
grand tors like bombed basilicas.
On the Costalunga you were out
alone – the rest wrung ragged
on the valley floor, the soldier
on the growling Moto Guzzi
smoking, side-tracked by the view,
not noticing the sweet dead boy
who paced you beautifully
in last June’s dimming colours,
towed you up the pass
as on an iron cable, taut
between you, gear and cadence
matched, his breathless lungs
yours too to breathe in,
till he turned to smile, and falling
back, released you for the summit,
slung you crying hard downwind.
Jordan
(Tour de France, 1937; Stage 8, Grenoble–Briançon)
Nothing – the wireless crooned –
so fine as you on Ballon d’Alsace.
But L’Auto’s yellow newsprint
dyed all jerseys jaune. No one heard
the gattling crackle of your lungs
above the tyres’ gutturals
on gravel tracks, the grind of engines
stuck in first. Viva Gino! screamed
a weeping roadside rock; helix
bends turned stomachs inside out.
Tearing free of Embrun in a mizzle,
close in Guido Rossi’s draught,
you saw his back wheel yaw;
how slow it was, how slow – steel
buckling and your slingshot fall
across the quincunx rivets of the bridge
to be baptised again, the torrent
making glacial whirlpools of your blood.
Dog
(Tour de France; Stage 8, Pau—Luchon, 14 July 1938)
You caught them saddle-napping
at Eaux-Chaudes – tickled
by the fatmen in their diapers
on the terrace of the spa –
and bolted like a gazehound,
only Vissers and Vervaecke
kicking with you, two lean stalkers
up the scree, the mad fairweather
masses thinning at each bend.
On the Tourmalet the fight was with
hurt’s angel, mind untwisting
on the coiling track, dust-throat
mocked by pilsner on the billboards
out of Louderville. On the Peyresourde
a girl in vichy-check ran out to snatch
a dachshund from the road; she left
your leg like bacon, all-black Vissers
and Vervaecke plunging past.
Damian Walford-Davies
Damian Walford Davies’s previous collections include Suit of Lights (2009), Witch (2012), Judas (2015) and Docklands (2019) – all published by Seren – together with the pamphlet Alabaster Girls (Rack Press, 2015). All of them reveal his interest in deploying the dramatic monologue and exploring historical terror and trauma through others’ voices. He is Pro Vice-Chancellor (Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences) at Cardiff University, Wales.
[These three poems are part of a collection-in-progress, Viva Bartali!, whose subject is the champion Italian (Tuscan) cyclist, Gino Bartali (1913—2000), twice winner of the Tour de France (1938, 1948) – known as ‘Gino The Pious’ (owing to his committed Catholic faith) and Ginettaccio (‘Gino the Terrible’ – owing to the short shrift he so often gave the Press).
Conjuring Bartali at crux moments in his personal life and professional career, though joy and tragedy, victory and defeat, the collection is a biography-in-verse inspired by the creative spirit of Italian sports journalism of the 1930s through to the 1950s – a lyrical, mythological mode now largely lost. As the dates suggest, the six sample poems are from the early part of the collection; the volume goes on to profile Bartali’s rivalry with the campionissimo Fausto Coppi (a ‘man of glass’ compared with Bartali’s ‘man of iron’) – which divided and defined a nation; the political unrest his 1948 Tour victory helped to diffuse; and his remarkable secret missions in the saddle during the war years, through which he helped save the lives of hundreds of Italian Jews at great personal risk. It was a deed for which he was posthumously named ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ by Yad Vashem in 2013.
The ghost in ‘Revenant’ is that of his beloved 19-year-old-brother, killed in 1936 in a cycling accident]
This is a response to Serendipity & Synchronicity, our first Spiritus Mundi theme.