The Pathologist

It was a strange meeting –
between Jones
and his successor...
one that neither could have
prepared for:
the old Doctor categorized
by his injuries and numbered.

No longer the processor
but the processed,
mortified, he lay there
and sighed –
in the manner of the dead.


31 August 1978

 

Sepia was an interesting magazine that ran from 1977 until 2002 as best I can see. It was one of the many small press magazines that were kicking around in the late seventies and the quality of the early issues left a lot to be desired but it was clearly a labour of love. Each one, at least for the first few issues, arrived in the post with a sepia-tinted postcard glued to the cover which usually fell off but what the heck? He didn’t just publish poetry. He produced wee booklets about Captain Beefheart too and something called The Cropthorne Camera of Minnie Holland, 1892-1905. The photo on issue 8 was of the switch station on the Ffestiniog gauge railway circa 1880 run by Mr and Mrs Will Jones from 1929 until 1968.

As best I can tell ‘The Pathologist’ was first published in Sepia 8 in April 1979. It also appeared in Effie 5; I don’t have a date for that but I suspect it was later. What was nice about Effie is they published it alongside ‘Stray’ with the correct layout and punctuation. The tone here is very similar to ‘The Venereologist’ but I think I’ve done a better job with the metaphors especially the double meaning of ‘mortified’. I was very pleased with that and it still makes me smile. Not quite sure why the new pathologist was called Jones other than the Welsh practice of tagging on a man’s job title at the end of his name to distinguish him from all the other Joneses out there: Jones the butcher, Jones the baker, Jones the pathologist.

I’ve been thinking about the first line and I suspect I borrowed ‘strange meeting’ from Wilfred Owen’s poem of the same name but I wouldn’t read too much into that.