Exercise Hour

By Oz Hardwick:

I/

Monstrous ships slump in the harbour, waiting for the Town
Hall bell. The lanes leading down are already choked with
blossoms, and the cuts we once ran down hand-in-hard aren’t
wide enough for foxes. Where last week were squares and
markets, makeshift waiting rooms wait in uncertainty, the
weight of their brutal cleanliness more forbidding than
reassuring. Already there is graffiti blaming elite conspiracies,
proclaiming the return of the Seven Sleepers, demanding
urgent but unspecified change in tortuous letters not quite the
colour of blood. What Anglican hymns parroted in school halls
didn’t teach us, we learned from B-movies and pulp Sci-Fi; so
we know that, behind one of these neatly painted doors,
something is growing, mutating. The Town Hall bell will ring,
the ships will leave, and foxes will whelp in disused waiting
rooms. For everything else, we shall have to find new words,
remind ourselves how to speak.

II/

While one door opens on wedding flowers, another opens on
raised musical instruments, each a tableau vivant representing
celebrations as we once knew them. There are flags
everywhere, and homemade bunting disgorges from beneath
porches and gables. Children have painted signs and posters
for windows, with exuberant colours standing in for misspelled
slogans they’ve borrowed from the TV, and the smell of baking
is so thick you could cut it with a silver filigree cake knife and
serve it in moist slices before it has even cooled. Every garden
has a wind-up gramophone and grandparents with tartan blankets
across their knees, nodding to Vera Lynn on 10-inch shellac. One
door opens on winking candles, another opens on champagne
stippling a picture-perfect sky; each a photograph in a History
textbook or a PowerPoint slide in a recap of our progress so far.
We stand in discrete family groups, eating hot chestnuts and
revelling in familiar details until, one by one, every door closes.

III/

So, tired of walking the same prescribed routes, I have taught
myself to fly, fashioning wings from beeswax and Marvel
comics, copying strokes from the common stock of myth. It’s
easier than you’d think: easier than ignoring the nagging
tickertape of unreliable figures, easier than falling asleep with a
head full of voices. From the quayside to the trig point, people
are still stranded in their gardens, fumbling with musical
instruments that have been gathering dust for years, and
buffeting the air with every unfocused but untamed emotion
that can only find voice once we abandon the notion of
language. I wave at weeping pensioners, blow kisses to bright,
clapping babies, and they sing back to me, songs from stage
musicals and Disney favourites. The TV people want to know
everything, from my inspiration to my insights into the current
pandemic, but my phone’s on silent in a house I can’t pick out
from here, in the pocket of a coat I’ll never need again this
close to the Sun. Wedding flowers wilt and the Town Hall bell
rings

***

Oz Hardwick is Professor of English at Leeds Trinity University, where he leads the postgraduate Creative Writing programmes. His chapbook Learning to Have Lost (Canberra: IPSI, 2018) won the 2019 Rubery International Book Award for poetry, and his most recent publication is the prose poetry micro-novella Wolf Planet (Clevedon: Hedgehog, 2020). He has also edited or co-edited several anthologies, including The Valley Press Anthology of Yorkshire Poetry (Scarborough: Valley Press, 2017) with Miles Salter, which was a UK National Poetry Day recommendation, and The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry (Scarborough: Valley Press, 2019) with Anne Caldwell. www.ozhardwick.co.uk