Nothing in "Ephemera" stays where you expect it to. A river glows, a star turns up inside a piece of wood, clouds harden into crags within sap, and by the end the sky has slipped beneath a boat. J.J. Loe builds a landscape in which the usual borders between water and sky, plant and cosmos, body and scenery keep dissolving. The title explains why: ephemera are things that last only a moment. The poem's central idea is that a fleeting instant, fully attended to, can feel bottomless rather than slight.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular beat, only free verse whose pacing is marked by slashes and dashes, which work like held breaths. The first stanza has almost no verbs. "Along the incandescent banks of the Yangtze / — the green star of the wood inside" is a string of glimpses, not a sentence, and only "crag" in the final line gives us anything like an action. It reads like looking before thinking has started. The second stanza gains "rolls," and the third gives us "ascends" and "moves." The grammar picks up motion as it goes, as if the poem were drifting away from the shore. When "Windless" opens the last stanza, it works almost like a stage direction for the whole piece.
Loe's images tend to set something vast inside something small, and then let the two blur. A "star" sits in the wood, and "idle clouds crag in the sap." The verb "crag" is the boldest word in the first stanza, because it makes soft, airy clouds behave like rock and then lodges them in a plant's liquid. Mountain, weather and tree flow into one another. "Cold Mountain" may recall Chinese hermit-poetry, and the Yangtze, heron and oarsman do borrow props from that world. The broken, dash-driven syntax, though, feels distinctly modern.
The second stanza crosses the senses. The sun is "blackened," as though noon light were so fierce it turned dark. A lantern becomes a flower with a "slaved stamen," a phrase that makes the glow sound compelled to serve. Then "the peal of her pleasance rolls / naked as a ship seduced," where a sound moves like a ship and is described through touch. The poem never says who "her" is, whether the Pearl addressed earlier, a woman, or the landscape itself. That ambiguity lets a quiet erotic charge hang over the scene without fixing it to a story. The "sea of dragon-fly wings" then makes the title visible. Dragonfly wings are transparent, shimmering and fragile, and here the whole sea is made of them. The ground itself is ephemeral.
The last stanza slows everything down. A heron rises through "the thoughtless day," and "thoughtless" is oddly generous, meaning a day without worry or calculation. Then comes the most striking turn: "the sky moves / bottomless and deep / beneath the oarsman's quiet boat." "Bottomless and deep" would normally describe water, but here it describes sky, which is reflected in the river and lies below the boat. The line break after "moves" also lets the sky, not the boat, be the thing in motion. The oarsman does nothing, and the world does the travelling. The poem ends without a verdict, only a suspended image.
What makes "Ephemera" worth reading is that it never mourns transience. Even "the lingering smell of nearing maturity" catches ripeness at the edge of passing and treats that edge as fullness. Instead of telling us that moments are short and precious, the poem makes us live inside one, as category after category of thing melts into the next. The reader finishes it a little unmoored, which is probably the point.