Hexagenia limbata
It is more than our minds can handle:
finding at the end of all meadows
a mandible, sunwashed and wordless.
Or, say, the centipede—little ladder
plumbing the dead stump’s cellar,
and how down there we imagined
we might not miss the bright city,
the impulse to speak to another.
Over time
we have been turned like venison
on a spit, the revolutions affording
us a sometime star or two. I look
now, love, to the brook trout pond
where a thousand mayflies lay
eggs that will sink to the bottom.
If we hold our ears still enough,
we may hear the earliest words
form in the unborn mouthparts.