Sometimes the Light

by dane hamann

illustration by brian campbell

Sometimes the light catches them just so
as they pour down a snaking hillside road
that they each flash like a grain of sun.

But then one by one they slide like knives 
into the forest again, becoming dappled beasts
descending to the coast of one sea or another.

They climb consistent as conveyor belts
past tree lines, out into the wasteland
of rock and snow on the high mountains.

Stucco wall shadows shepherd them around
the curbs of narrow city streets, trattoria
awnings fluttering like flags, until they pop

into the light-box brightness of a cobbled
piazza. It’s May, and the riders are leaving
so much on the pastel roads of Italy.

For three weeks their hearts hammer
against the anvil of breastbone. Fire whipping
through lungs. Their minds somersaulting

as they churn across sunbaked tarmac.
Sometimes, with the warbling shriek-song
of disc brakes and fishtailed wheels, they crush 

together like a murmuration of starlings,
a compression that threatens to spill them
across the road, leave them sprawled in ditches.

Then suddenly they unravel from each other,
a long string of carbon fiber stretching
into a new dark shape between the shoulders 

of the road. Sweat-blurred finish lines morph
into the peaks and valleys of heartrate charts
and wattage graphs. They study the numbers,

recon the percorso, bookmark a spot
where a dynamite move will catapult them
from the bunch into the beautiful openness

of closed roads. They redline and paceline.
They break away and chase. They ask
questions of themselves the cameras can’t

quite capture. They falter. They find themselves
donning rosa, ciclamino, azzurra, bianca.
They triumph. They stumble into embraces

for sacrifices made in the hot lingering air
of Italian late afternoons, the dust of the day
sticking to their shining faces. Road buzz

never quite leaving their bodies. Sometimes
the light reveals just how deep they’ve descended
into the well of effort to make it to the line.

                                                                 for the 105th edition of the Giro d’Italia

Dane Hamann is a Chicagoland editor and poet. His first book, A Thistle Stuck in the Throat of the Sun (Kelsay Books, 2021), is ostensibly about running. Occasional tweets @donnyhamms.