Journal ~ Ephemeral Stanzas — poetry, art, poetic practice ~ Anna Morrison

Probably because I am an anxious person, I've been called a perfectionist since childhood. But I often feel that I am working away from disaster, rather than toward perfection. Every hour tiptoes the ledge of a vat bubbling with threats. Perfection seems the least of one's worries. I can't escape disaster, but my poems can seek opportunities to create, explore, or sustain. A stanza might patch a snow sled for flotation in the ocean. Or some lines may fascinate rocks till earth whispers molten secrets. When I come upon a rattlesnake in the road, I step back—very slowly—and then I wait for the rattlesnake to pass: still as death, she may only be resting as she digests her prey. Likewise, there's increasing power and tension as a wave builds towards its crest—I've learned to step away from peril, but not too far and not too fast. I am a student of the power and the collapse.

Lately, I've been interested in ephemeral stanzas. These brief lyric fragments come into being already engaged with disaster's inevitability: the wind will carry off the last word, a weighty mosquito will topple a line balanced on a leaf, frayed syllables will slip into the deepest crevice of a burnt-out stump. Would a spider bother to gather them? Would an insect-seeking bird? I could be nesting material. Regardless, it rains. There are new mushrooms. A poem emerging under such open, site-specific conditions flirts more directly with entropy and highlights my futile efforts: I can't distance the poem (or myself) from collapse. Here, working so exposed, I only try to keep time with disaster—there is etiquette even in the most charged movements, an understanding to maintain eye contact, to pretend not to notice when your partner steps on your toes.

A precariously balanced poem falls apart. Yet these stanzas exist as they decompose. The lines often follow me around, a bit ear-wormy. Even as I visualize them, the words rearrange themselves—stump to branch to window ledge. I wrote the poem? A ghost signature leaves a watermark on my mind, and then that particular constellation of lines comes into focus. Is my memory a mark that proves the ephemeral stanza continues? All these fragments slip into purpose as if purpose were the most comfortable nightshirt. As if these words must appear to make eyes at me every morning, and I must likewise come into focus to receive their flirtation. When I wake up, I get to be an ant on my thigh. I get to be my own bare thigh.