These three poems by Thom G. Jordan take you home; take you on a journey away from home, and then further still — hand in hand with hope — into an uncertain future…
Poems and Painting by: Thom G. Jordan
B-ROADS Driving through a place there’s a distance no odometer measures. It passes through air like bread left out to glass and metal and then beyond. The world is speaking to you but you’re too busy looking at something off to the right — a hare maybe — you say you’ll get back to it tomorrow. The trees are indolent, pedestrians make maquettes of themselves. Neither take any notice of the sun out there faking her death. Until you step out, you’re not there. When you do, into a lay-by and into the sensory, you lick the buttered sky — ask the pissing construction worker for a little privacy. Without distraction soundless night plays differently. You find yourself asking the road for company, or music, and it responds with operatic roadkill. Which is not the conversation you had in mind, but the red hare in the boot makes for a good story tomorrow
WELL BORN In the place that is home the apples pick themselves. Sublimities are put to flood in perpetual dusk of sun pillars suspended with the deer’s decision to cross. Sometimes you have to die first — but not here. Here you can still walk in the middle of the road with the plate you’re handed as it overflows with filigreed acanthus greens. Here children receive all the teaching they’ll need from the holy women of lengthening afternoon; their incense burning in its footrace through your limbic system. Here parochialism has a feast day where you sit fringed in anthropocene with the same families from domesday to doomsday. Here in your geocentrism you are oblivious to the world’s blue circuitry beyond: still functioning, irrespective of observance or liking. Here you aren’t your biggest detractor — there are magpies for that. Here the empty passenger seat placeholder of oxeye daisy and sweet pea will never wilt. Here the beehive songs being written are still on the wind as the sycamore coughs into its elbow. Here it won’t be long before curtains are done away with and once more everyone takes to watching windows from windows. And whilst roads do go unrepaired and neighbours still fight over the earth into which they’ll plant the clematis too shallow; you don’t need to deny sight for sanity’s sake
INTO FIELDS WITHOUT FENCES Tonight spring will be overheard arranging its rushlights in the wood. We will watch through fingers for their movements, attentive to the purples and whites of their jaws. Only by understanding these perennial beginnings will we divest the marriage of memory and renewal of its lethality. In this work our good name precedes us. Around us Clare’s pastoral — that is to say the one he feared. In our XXI century it must be enough to know the fields were once populated and that walking on knees we might find again their keyholes, and see some God. But the prospect is aspirin expired: we are unmoved by moments — only insight wins us now. The issue is here a lifetime’s change passes with night beneath the gull’s white eye. Winter was a conversation without questions with us ears at the cold glass doing all the listening. You were skeptical as ladders raised into blue newness and asked about harm having lived half your years. For that reason I couldn’t respond. In time our eyes which are just the starting point shall disclose their secrets; their hoarded frenzies. And into their vacated place will be thrown new naked flames: purply and blanketing. We have chosen our rootstock. Now commences the undefined wait
Thom G. Jordan was born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom, in 1992. He has a first class honours degree in Humanities from the Open University. Jordan is both a poet and a painter, with the entirety of his work considering themes of place, art, nature and human experience. He has only recently returned to poetry after many years away from the medium.
