Evan A. Jordan: The Ethereal You
Editor’s Note: The poems and digital paintings from a project Evan A. Jordan has been working on since 2016, The Tom Thomson Abstracts. Each piece has a written and visual component, which responds to and "abstracts" one of Tom Thomson's paintings and Jordan’s own interactions with the landscapes in Algonquin Park, Ontario, where Thomson painted a century ago; the artworks in the series are Jordan’s own updated take on ekphrastic poetry.
Path Behind Mowat Lodge, Spring 1917
Away into the ethereal you
lead us across the sumptuous
white lines of cloud soft hands
laid down like snow before us
spread shadows along the route
a rich gelatinous blue like you
into the red muddle of the future
over the crunch of footfalls biting
Ontario’s brittle meringue, I taste
sugar, a romantic arrived late
in the weight you applied to this
strange mise-en-scene foreshadowing
the bottom-of-lake blue drowning you
Petawawa Gorges, 1914
Where we hear a noise like you show
a gorgeous starkness that elides
the pedestrian lurking behind our eyes
beauty between the fall of light and darkness
pervades beneath crag, canyon and echoes
of lost shouts drowned in distance separated
by ice ages, continental shifts and the planular
carvings of gods, an innate animalism
bred into basalt, your own geological survey
of ossified bones and a land peopled
vast before your canoe, divided and
split, but our current still runs through you
Pine Island 1914
At Sturgeon Point the pines bend
to any analogy sung or sailed, spines
withered and arthritic, but you never
saw the effect of years on a wet veneer
a slippery stone approach unpassable
as death in the boughs, shadow in daylight
angrily blown cirrus frightened and alone
kin of my kin searching cathedral in sky
you’ve turned your brush around sharp
as wood on canvas, a patina like lichen
settled on everything here, my family
home, three figures in the foreground
hunched gray beavers gnawing away
Silver Birches, 1915/1916
Twilit dusk striped by clear water green
you exhale a copse like ribbons of smoke
in my eyes, bend the world into a clutch
of blue green, blue green are these trees
twisted and sinister, imagine the smell
of blue, tenebrous and cool, a deep under
current of oil, treacherous yet gentle, you
make me afraid of night, throw a shroud
around the shoulders of earth, lumped and
hidden in shadows, blue white of cataract
irises gaze from within this canvas, longing
escape to a false freedom your hands create
from sky speckled wrists your fingers fly free
The Dead Pine, 1916
How you are stunted and trapped within
stratocumulus swirls of gray misgiving
white scratches and the exposed wood
of your skin, bare patches and gaps
at the edges of plywood, cheap particle
board and oil, a monster of navy, black
irresistible midnight blue branches
in dead shadow, skewer day with shards
cuts angles above those same blue hills
on the far shore again and again, you look to
escape the chop and sizzle of open water
your island of maroon torment, buried
by the maple and sumac fire of fingerprints
Evan A. Jordan is a poet, writer and visual artist. His work has appeared in TLR, Matrix Magazine, Acta Victoriana, CV2, Bleacher Report, The Glasgow Gallery of Photography, PHOTO IS:RAEL, and in The Poetry Grow-op, as part of the Antigonish Review . He has published a collection of short stories, Didn't I Tell You? and a collection of poems, Passages. He currently lives in Saigon, Vietnam.
