Ephemeroptera

On a slab of Jurassic shale, an ovate

body, legs fine as eyelashes,

the mayfly's precise signature,

consummate, immortal.

Now its descendents, in a tumult

of mating, roil the air on Koerner's

sluggish creek below the hill

where the Ebenezer Baptist church,

its doors agape, declines daily

into dust and rubble.

Beyond the church, the graveyard

encroached by nightshade

and nettle, its stones listing

or broken or gone, a few bearing

words now scarcely visible:

Eliza, Beloved Wife . . . In Perpetual . . . .

A million years from now the stricken

stones will be scoured clean

and ephemerids will rise each spring

to dance above the clouded waters.