Issue 6: January 2004

Paul Batchelor | Zoë Brigley | Olivia Cole | Sasha Dugdale | Anna Woodford

OLIVIA COLE

Il Duce's Match

Rome, summer 1940. Mussolini attempted to impress the Americans with his tennis and to retain control by penning every headline printed ...

Your serve was never great — often out of control,
every other ball would soar so high and plummet
to the ground, whistling as quietly as a bomb,
the fatal one they say you hear or is it never hear . . .

before landing miles out. Second serve.
I remember how time after time, I willed it to go right,
for you to push ball over net with the softness
and precision of a kitten, the relief

of those occasional rallies. You small and hot
and reddening, as three turned into four o'clock,
flagging opposite streams of young diplomats —
all important friendships wooed across those warm weeks —

the need for an ally behind your struggle
to entertain the Yanks, to master tennis:
that summer's most popular and most fashionable
invented game. Our shaded court, the heavy air,

cut by laughter and fifteen love, il Duce,
applause on cue. Net. The ball splicing over,
as close a call as those I would wake to,
listening from our huge white bed, to you

in the bathroom, as you washed and shaved,
only your shadow visible on the cool of the black marble floor
as I resisted the start of each day — content to lie
and listen to the sound of your beauty regime:

the slow scraping of razor across skin, left to right,
straining to reach the very back of the head
you shaved entirely the day you blushed
to find your hair receding — a soft low curse

as occasionally the razor slipped
and caught flesh, those little red flecks of error
that in all those hundreds of posed pictures never
showed up. Prediletto, I think, even now, of how

when time began to run like sand through your hands,
you would wake worrying from the dream
in which you forgot to shave your head,
love fifteen, were late at your desk, and a headline

not penned by you slipped though the net, love thirty,
and you couldn't find an umpire to lie, love forty,
and make decisions, thirty love, at which those lithe American boys
would shake their heads, forty love, and frown, game, set, match,

and shrug, as I stood by waiting with lemonade, Coca Cola
and Pimms, all the latest, necessary fads,
looking from under my broad rimmed expensive hat,
on their gold tanned flesh . . .

I dream too, of those summer days, and wake convinced
even now of what you — dead, defeated
and gone — said you always knew:
that it's the details — piccolo, minuscolo —

that matter most in the end; the seconds
and the split seconds between serves, that shot
that you almost, but not quite, got,
the sun in your eyes, the all important present or absent

breeze in the trees; dreams, in which the world, amore,
is not black and white, but colour —
so that the blood shows up — those minute nicks that through
un-remembering sleep, some mornings, I still reach to kiss.

Flight Paths

I stood in your shower, how many times?
Well, so many times, pausing always
to look through steam and water and glass
at the city's ineradicable stretch,

washing, wondering how many there must be
to give that flickering orange haze
of glimpsed specifics — rooms, yellow
and stacked, curtains raised to show

silhouettes walking across their sets,
drawing, eating, murdering quietly
for all I know or could do —
glances, pauses, halves

of dancing couples illuminated,
until they slip from view to pursue
the routes that have for them,
like us, become routine; their shadow play

hanging on the flick of a single switch,
goodbyes played out elaborately across the hours —
as I would stand, one tentative fingertip
tracking across the centimeters and the miles,

the city a condensed pane of glass
to reach for and write on — traced and known:
as impossible to hold as remembered strings of amber beads,
glinting un-lifted from long passed market stalls.

Balcony Scene

Far below, a boy skating, dangerously close
to the solid jump of the curb. The hard cycles
of the wheels rolling over and over themselves
as I gaze. A ladybird, precariously high,

on the cool white stone, leaping to pause
on my arm's bared skin before I flick it
unthinkingly: the building falling gently away.
The sun, soon to lie low in the sky,

content for now, to be squinted into,
sharpening the worn silver of my ring
to a glassy, newly moulded tint; a man
and a woman grounded in a conversation

I can't hope to hear, cartoon gestures,
heated words lost to the warm air,
and cars whose paths my eyes lazily trace,
until they disappear from view.

'Il Duce's Match' was the winning poem in the Writers Inc (formerly Blue Nose Poets) Writers of the Year 2003 competition.

Olivia Cole was born in 1981 and read English at Christ Church, Oxford, where she was a scholar and won the Gibbs Prize for her thesis on Sylvia Plath. In 2003 she won an Eric Gregory award, and was selected to be an Arvon-Jerwood Poetry apprentice.