Issue 32: Alan Halsey
More Notes & Quandaries
Spiraea
whose name I remember
every spring I’ve forgotten
until about the third day
after your flying carpets
of tiny white flowers have
risen above your lowlying
neighbours I recall it
sounds like an infection
an ill spirit on its yearly
visitation & so blest
are the herbalists who
name you Meadowsweet
Swellfoot Blues
I woke up one morning
and I was Oedipus Swellfoot
which is much more serious
than an overgrown beetle
or so my doctor thought.
‘Oedipus’ he said ‘I’m worried.’
His surgery is not often visited
by tyrants who happened
to marry their mothers
although in my case my
mother is lately dead. I
limply replied ‘I’m okay
necrophilia was never one
of my temptations.’ ‘I
won’t leave it to chance’
my doctor responded ‘this
swellfoot could march all
the way to your heart if you
have one.’ So he called
in the nurse and the nurse
passed the news to the chemist.
‘We have a fellow called
Oedipus Swellfoot here.’
‘Him again?’ sighed the chemist
‘Give him the usual dose
of potassium.’ How can I tell
if that’s the right diagnosis
or if it would have done
for my latest namesake.
Come, newfound friend,
let’s hobble on to Colonus
lest we’re prognosed goners.
Twist or Bust
So many more
last things left
to understand
for as things
go things tend
to last until
there’s nothing
to say except
say you said it
By the By
& by the way
& besides beside that
to weigh up
waste by the wayside
& by way of an aside
somewhat acidic but
clicked or clocked
best before sellby
As for which & as if
it signed out by & by
as if that was how or what
it meant to say bye bye
Brief Border Tales for Storage in a Unisage Sputum Pot
‘Me, a top salesman in the biggest outfit in Chesterfield,’ Dicky lamented, ‘and now I’m in a ratrun that calls itself a hospital.’
‘What do you think?’ Roger asked Stu. Stu narrowed his eyes to slits. He eventually came out with ‘I don’t think unless I’m made to.’ Then pointing at a southron recently arrived on the opposite bed he snorted ‘Madeleine!’
A Proustian quip? Probably not although Stu claimed he’d met Quasimodo somewhere in Sheffield and reckoned he knew for whom the bell tolled as well as William Blake ever did.
By his second afternoon in the Recovery Ward Stu had decided the southron was a gentleman probably of Chinese descent. When one of us coughed he muttered ‘I don’t want to be in a ring’ but like most old men we slept through days and nights unconcerned about improving the view.
Stu seemed to have died around the time of evening service but now he was sitting up in bed and munching a few surly lettuce leaves. ‘If you’re going to complain call me Dorothy,’ the auxiliary told us. ‘I’ve never been called that before.’ But Stu and I agreed we didn’t know who to blame so we left it at that.
Nobody quite understood what Stu said. Maybe he didn’t himself but Stu wasn’t mad. I hadn’t noticed at first that he’d lately had his surviving leg cut off below the knee. ‘Trustnauts,’ he said, ‘that’s what I’m interested in and what I talk about. Trustnauts.’ I wonder about the spelling: ‘trustnaughts,’ possibly.
‘Stu worries me sometimes. I think he’s found out how the invisibility trick works. I mean mine, not his. But Stu says he’s ready to fleur away.’ ‘Fleur?’ ‘Yes, fleur.’ And then the question none of us could answer: ‘How can I tell if your field’s on or off?’
The southron used his Covid mask to save his place in Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition. He was expecting his 7 o’clock drip an hour ago. Stu retrieved his grey dishcloth wig from his rucksack and flopped it on his nearly bald head. It gradually slipped off and what relief when Stu looked like Stu again.
Ballard p.87: ‘All too clearly there had been a serious piece of miscasting.’ Stu asks me how come I’m reading the same book after all this time and I wonder this too: I’m usually a very quick reader. I also wonder why nobody asks what I’m reading but that’s easy to explain: these people are not themselves readers, they’ve not brought a single book of their own. Not, however, to overlook the fact that unlike Ballard I can scarcely tell one make of car from another. Atrocities are simpler to distinguish.
Notes on More Notes & Quandaries.
More Notes and Quandaries are a few waifs and strays I found sheltering amongst those which were previously published in Issue 29 of Blackbox Manifold. Written when Alan was terminally ill they display his droll and mordant humour in the face of adversity and often crippling pain. The prose piece in particularly demonstrates his fierce resilience during one of his prolonged and fraught hospital stays when one of his fellow patients, picking up on Alan’s accent which was decidedly not Yorkshire, chose to refer to him as Madeleine. Far from being offended Alan just chuckled because as with most things all he heard was grist to his all consuming verbal mill.
Geraldine Monk 2024
Alan Halsey. Poet, artist and co-director of the antichoir Juxtavoices. He ran The Poetry Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye from 1979-96 and and was the editor of West House Books. His major publications include The Text of Shelley’s Death (Five Seasons 1995), Marginalien(Five Seasons 2005) Not Everything Remotely (Salt 2006), Selected Poems (Shearsman 2017) and Remarks of Uncertain Consequence (Five Seasons 2022). He was an Affiliated Poet at Sheffield University’s Centre for Poetry and Poetics. Alan died in October 2022.
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