IN OTHER DAYS

ROGER CRAIK

BLAZEVOX[BOOKS]
Buffalo, New York
In Other Days
by Roger Craik
Copyright © 2021

Published by BlazeVOX [books]

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced

without the publisher’s written permission, except for brief
quotations in reviews. Printed in the United States of America

Interior design and typesetting by Geoffrey Gatza

Cover Art: Wendy Craik

First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-60964-367-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020940722

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HOME (1956-65)

The rainy fields

of sheep and cows in Leicestershire.

The Morris Minor

ambling the narrow roads and lanes.

And at the front my parents,

young in their coats.

II

Every road
led out of Leicester into Leicestershire.
Peatling Magna, Peatling Parva, Wistow Hall,
Leicestershire moving in the small
triangular window.

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WORK, 1963

My grandfather would be gone

before I woke.

He took two buses:

one to Richmond, one to Chiswick
out on the Great West Road.

I could not grasp what I was told,

but that was work for twenty years for him
after the war.

Leather case. Cafeteria.

A few men’s names.

Behind the net curtain, in my pajamas,

I would watch for him returning,
turning the corner
in his long dark coat.

14
FOXTON LOCKS

Lying on his stomach, his forearms on the sun-warmed

rounded stone, he stared into the depths. He couldn’t see the
bottom, only dark green plants rising towards him. Once, near
the surface, a tadpole wriggled past. Every now and then he was
aware of his mother and father talking, and of his father’s
glance. He wondered what would happen to the tadpole in its
life; and in due course no longer wondered what made the
clouds English clouds, or why the Grand Union Canal was
Union or why it was Grand.

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LEWES, 1966

The taut green

tennis ball spinning from my fingertip,
spanking the hot patio, half-volleying
up against the brickwork and

soaring in the sky all over England

to clasp itself in my palm

again and again and again.

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RITA SOWTER AND THE SURREYS

How plumped with Englishness

the names of those white-blazered ladies
against whom, for years of afternoons,
my grandmother played lawn-green bowls,
well into her seventies:
Marjorie Marlow, Brownie Neave,
Thelma Barton, Florrie Mist,
Mrs. Buckland (whose first name
I never knew), the two Elsies,
Elsie Waight and Elsie Snow!

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ARTHUR WAIGHT

He took the game up late, around the time

Sainsbury's was coming in.
His grocer’s shop, its poky living quarters at the back,
was breaking even at best, was feeling the pinch,
my grandfather kept saying.

Soon he was bowls club champion.

He beat Bernie Comfort 21-7.

My grandfather said that after that,

they went and made him captain.
That's when Arthur Waight got arrogant.

On my own I started noticing

that once the slightest thing went wrong for him,
he could not let it be, but by degrees
would make it worse, advancing over everything
a savage-sullen pleasure in defeat
that even then I found perverse.
I think I was afraid of him.

But one afternoon,

I saw him take his thermos flask,
unscrew the top that served as a cup,
put it on the ground and begin
pouring coffee for himself.
The cup was upside-down.
His wife squawked and pointed, pointed and squawked,
but Arthur carried merrily on,
laughing, laughing,
the coffee splashing away in the sun.

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KINGSTON, 1978

Winter and an indeterminate time

on Sunday afternoon. I’m in Kingston,
living with my grandparents rather than
with Kim and Carolyn on Putney Hill,
as I had planned. Within an hour,
the light will start to fade. It’s too late
to stroll down Orchard Road to stare
into lit, unpeopled shops. So I’m here
in the living room. The TV’s on:
“The Big Match” with bald Brian Moore.
Sunderland v Middlesborough. Half-time score:
0-0. All the games are yesterday’s.

My grandparents’ cigarettes are poised

cylinders of ash. The ceiling blurs
in seas of slowly-heaving smoke, like Elgar.

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IN THE PLAYING FIELDS

“He played for England twenty years back,”

one of their fathers remarks.
But to the scatter of small boys
dashing to the soccer pitch,
he's that old nutter at it again,
shooting at an empty net.

The taut-seamed ball

wristily spinning
into the fingertips and
placed upon the spot (precisely on the spot:
it mustn't budge from where it's put: the spot),
and then the sternly-paced-out strides
to where he stands (unrattled by catcalling fans
whose jeers, whose jeers would make a weaker man
lose his nerve)
thinking it through
from run to swing to high up to the left
beyond the reach of any flailing glove
of any goalie,
any fucking goalie in the fucking world—and
charges in to strike.

The boys are gone. The damp is on the rise.

But still he steadies, pauses, takes his aim
at goalposts dimming into ghostliness,
thunders in to make the leather pay . . .

Around the playing fields

the poplars darken and the street lamps gleam.

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PARK OF HUMAN RIGHTS, IZMIR

Outlandish by the sea,

it makes the gesture of itself:

İnsan Hakları Parkı

open for you and everyone

to saunter round its gardens,

regard three colossal

slabs of marble arches

justified by lists of men

who fell in wars, or died of wounds.

The chiseled legend reads

“her insan özgür.”

(Each human is free.)

From these structures in this park,

a black gigantic spike

goes slanting, high and deep

above the forced-in shrubs, the walkways

frozen hot in ripples, up

over the Aegean, the living sea.

But should your eye

sidle back down to where the spike begins,

it’ll snag
a clumsy barricade of wire

to pierce, to stripe
that urchin whose one aim

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is climbing climbing climbing

past that black and red

skull and bones

—YASAK—

and higher, up to the spot

where he’ll stand and point and laugh and mock.

No explanation is given of the spike.

No explanation is given of the wire.
No list of names depends on either.

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IN DALYAN

In Dalyan, the town whose name means weir,

I woke up early, at least an hour
before the sky grew grey,
and heard the call for prayer.
Staring out across watery
darkness, out across the reeds,
I saw no mosque, no minaret,
its small lights twinkling. There was
only a voice, an old man’s voice,
a very old man nearing death, I thought,
quavering through the reeds, the mist,
calling on his god.

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REMBRANDT

In the damp
shadow of the synagogue
stands Rembrandt van Rijn.

In close dark families,

in twos and threes, or alone,
the Jews of Amsterdam go past.

Bent to Sabbath, they do not remark

the charcoal moving to the hand
that draws them back through centuries
beyond Spain and Portugal, borrowed lands,
to Israel moving in the blood
and in the god they pray to still
behind a wooden door.

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TO OLGA KORBUT

Like a slowly-rotating star,

you began your progress, dignified the beam,
then ridiculed its four-inch breadth
as if you were an urchin skipping away
on flagstones in a grimy street
and not, fey Soviet,
prancing into the world’s hot retina
that German city’s summer
in the Brezhnev time.

But soon, as they were bound to do,

the others came.

And you?

There must be books, a biography or two.

Footage. Interviews.

Instead you have known contentments in your life,

thought folding into thought along
great beech-lined afternoons of unremembering,
and you no longer caring
how you are remembered now, or if.

25
IN GENEVA STATE PARK, OHIO

The rain grew heavier.

I had America to myself.

On an almost-whim I drew the gear

down into low, went stooging round
the stretching runway of the parking lot, the rain
snare-drumming on the girder of a stiff brown bag
from yesterday’s gas station wine,
and splashing into the back
upon a slither of CD’s.

As dawdlingly I made
great oblongs in the afternoon,
on either side the trees were moving
backwards and towards at different speeds,
each one unique, collectively as woods.

Becalmed in this enormous loosening,

I could have drifted on, have drifted on
all afternoon, to twilight and beyond,
but for restiveness, the heel of my hand
angled—fractious-tense—to
ratchet up the gears, lurch the
world out of itself
and back into unnaturalness.

More than twenty years

has torn me from that afternoon
of driving rain.

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NEW YEAR’S EVE, 1999

Daylight weakens. One century

is folding into the next.

Half the world away is midnight.

In England, in their single beds,
my parents are sleeping.

Their parents are gone.

I am the last of the line.

Headstones hewn from Midlands slate.

Graves in older countries still.
Perhaps there are no graves at all,
shattered, toppled in long grass.

Fragments, words passed on.

The cart that never made it from Orel,

but broke its axle,
so instead of getting back that night
he had to put up in a shabby town,
at the inn . . .

and the wars and snows and trudging

and the struggle through the birch woods
and changing a name just in and out of recognition
and trains rattling through foreign towns at night
and four dark flights of stairs unbannistered
and a sister gone to the bad
and God becoming fainter
or not at all
and cribbage in air raid shelters
and waving the Union Jack when relief came
and cricket from the Oval on a small black-and-white screen
and the first children coming home from university
themselves and altered and themselves
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and forging a virtue out of forgetfulness
and a virtue out of memory
and one yet greater good of misremembering
or simply forgetting . . .

What holds?
What is there to hold?

The last of the sun

is crimsoning into the world.

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WIDOW OF CAIN, IN AGE

Of my life before, before

he came and took me,

I remember little.

He was a stranger.
From the West, he muttered, to the earth.
And then the day with wine and the goblets
and the modest apparatus of prayer.
And my lynx-eyed sister
watching from the shadows.

He never was content,

now I believe.
Holding my wrist he strode
sharply through the noonday scrub and stones
to the tent that stood apart.

And later, caves.

He would speak to those who spoke
no tongue I knew,
toothless men who grinned and scratched,
rubbing thumb and finger.
Exile—

I do remember, yes.

Into the skins and deeper

red it burned.
I saw it after the others did.
It would blister my flesh, I remember,
as I looked away, thinking of the dew,
the vetch between the rocks in spring,
the hyrax and the lammergeier
and the sun a line of blood
beyond the mountains, over Eden.
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Oh he said nothing
but in his sleep would turn towards the West.

For years—
for years in the night he would glare at the wall,
moving his finger great from right to left
over the fissures, the discoloration,
seeking, then I thought, God in the quartz
saying nothing. Perhaps in the past . . .
But I, I was always alone.
Of my life before him I remember little, little, I tell you,
but those were the years when he would leave
before dawn to return, in darkness deepened,
with eyes vein-serpented and blood-rivered nails and the mark
vermillion. And already, leagues away,
massive from his hands was taking shape
a city, the greatest city east of Eden
monumentally hewn and raised at God,
called Enoch after the son I bore him, a rock in my womb,
but in his stern image, branded Cain,
who without legend died
a strong-armed stone’s throw from the towers
upthrust,
and the gate,
open towards the West.

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