Oz Hardwick
Adventures in Animation
Handmade and hand-me-down, I wear love like I did in school.
It’s not as cold as when I was a kid, but I wrap on that long,
loose-knit scarf, and head for the station like a child on the
edge of a Brueghel scene. At the centre of the frame is a fox,
all red smoking jacket and tricksy grin. I catch him up on the
platform, and he holds open the train door with an elaborate
bow, then follows me on board. We’re the only passengers, but
he plumps himself opposite me, sips a nip from a silver hip
flask, and lights a slim panatela. We fall to talking about
cinema, about the nobility of self-sacrifice in Casablanca, the
message of hope that saves even the bad Star Wars movies,
and the ambiguity of anthropomorphised foxes. He
acknowledges the benefits of Disney’s positive spin, but
prefers Wes Anderson by a country mile. But it’s when he
mentions Starewicz – pronouncing it like my old Polish
girlfriend’s father, who always refused to speak English to me
– that his eyes glitter with fire and tears. Heartfelt, he says,
exhaling a thin heart of smoke, handmade and hand-me-down.
He reaches for my scarf with paws that today are fingers,
savours the loops and crossings of old wool as if they were
trails he ran with his mother when he was a cub who knew
nothing of the world. Outside, towns pass in stop motion, a
deer raises its face in salutation, children bustle to the sound of
a school bell, and trees open wide mouths to sing.
Feast and Famine
Hunger takes up too much space, so we’ve stacked it in the
attic amongst the broken records, the jars of tears, and all the
other things that grow when we forget that they’re there. I
remember climbing up as a child, my father gripping my hand
to stop me slipping between the slats and plaster, the sound of
my mother rising like steam from below, praying for our
return. It was simultaneously light and dark in a way I still
can’t explain, and we spoke to my grandparents who I’d
thought had died, though no one had invited me to the funerals.
Granddad was playing lopsided dance tunes on a wheezing
melodeon, humming the steps around a corncob pipe, while
Gran kept time with her knit one, purl one, cast off rhythm.
Boxes tottered like a Grecian ruin and the dust smelled like
boiled chicken. We left something there by a pile of wartime
papers, beneath a bottle of eyes. That night, as the cuckoo
clock called nine, they said I was a man, though I felt no
different, and after the celebratory feast I still ached for more.
Mute
It’s not been a straightforward journey. The bus was late, the
roads were flooded, and the driver was transitioning into a
swan. I am not, I should stress, a cygnophobe, and some of my
best friends are fluid between states of being, but a myth is a
myth, and the rush hour’s no time for transformation. Mute as a
sculpture by Jean Arp – white painted plaster, fashioned
between wars – he took my money and gave me a tangle of
weeds. He gave me a look like an innocent god, and he gave a
shiver to carry to my destination. There was no map, there was
no timetable, and when I looked out of the grime-lapped
windows, there was no city to speak. The world was becoming
water. There were no words.
Oz Hardwick is a European poet, photographer, barely-competent bass guitarist, and accidental academic. His most recent full collection, 'A Census of Preconceptions' (SurVision Books, 2022), was shortlisted for a number of international awards but didn’t win any, though he feels pretty confident about the upcoming egg-and-spoon race. His latest publications are the chapbook My Life as a Time Traveller: a Memoir in 18 Discrete Fragments (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2023) and the co-edited anthology (with Cassandra Atherton) Dancing About Architecture (MadHat, 2024). Oz is Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University (UK).
