I'd like to think one poem with which it immediately converses is Murphy's, a quatrain Dick extravagantly praised shortly before he wrote Mayflies.

The Hatch

Over the sodden ditches
midges and mayflies swarm,
harbingers of riches
and offspring of the storm.

Bob, You're quite welcome.
I had not thought of "cotillion."

Incidentally, the famously reticent
Mr. Wilbur, when I somewhat boorishly
caught him at a reception and told him
how wonderful I thought the buried sense
of the "caller" was in this poem,
simply beamed at me. And kept on beaming...
with no reply! But then, I think he was
beaming at everybody. Reticence and dignity
and decorum don't begin to cover this subject!

Tim,

Why would mayflies be "offspring of the storm"? Have we the same bug in mind? Because mayflies' wings are so fragile, they have to mate in calm weather.

Bob

Regarding "quadrillions," the following evidence leaves me no other recourse but to bow to Mr. Wilbur.

"In an unheralded and sometimes annoying consequence of cleaner waterways, mayflies are mating and dying in greater numbers than they have in half a century. The insects have been swarming in such volumes this summer that they have to be shoveled from riverside streets and scraped from bridges with snowplows.

Fifteen times this summer at twilight, Randall A. Grady, the police chief in this little Mississippi River town, said he had to dispatch an officer to turn off the street lights so as not to attract the mating flies. One night, he said, the officer had to put on a raincoat because there were so many winged missiles in the air.

With layers of slippery, dying mayflies on the streets, people here say an evening stroll can be perilous. The dead flies coat the decks of boats. Mornings after a big swarm, merchants have to power-wash the corpses from their windows.

"They build up, layer upon layer," said Cathy Corpian, who has a bookkeeping and telephone answering service here. "They're greasy. They stick to you. They stink. They smell like dead fish."

But Ms. Corpian added, "They're good." "

I'm used to prowling somewhat smaller rivers than the Mississippi. Mayfly swarms over the Great Lakes get picked up by Doppler radar. "Incoming! Duck."

I don't think that Wilbur had the Mississippi or Lake Superior in mind, given the details of his poem, or he might have resorted to "bazillions."

Bob the Penitent

Bob, On the High Plains, it takes a big rain to hatch them. So they are infrequent, like our crops! I love bazillions, and I'll suggest it to him.

[quote]Originally posted by Tim Murphy:

"On the High Plains, it takes a big rain to hatch them. So they are infrequent, like our crops!"

Well, that's unusual, in that where I've fly fished -- the eastern U.S., Montana, Alaska, Ireland, Wales -- they're periodic. Locally, as long as the weather cooperates, we can fish predictably to their schedule.

From my readings, I understand that this is true globally, the nature of the beast. So, in my estimation, Fargo grows stranger and stranger..."beaucoup dinky," as Meserve (Sean Penn) says in de Palma's "Casualties of War."

Shameless

celestial dance
 

The last verse of Mayflies pretty much sums up my reason to be ... at least with regard to my celebration of nature through poems.

Has anyone here (on this forum) ever experienced the dance he is describing? Those were not "mayflies" in a technical sense. They were "midges" and the "dance" was a mating ceremony wherein a lot of action takes place. The movement he describes takes careful observation to discern. Individual midges rise (fly) quickly up the center of the spherical group and then fan out to the side before dropping/floating gradually down to the bottom, where the individual repeats the pattern, shooting up the center once again.

This is really an extraordinary insect mating dance, one of my favorites. And it is most easily seen near dusk, when the sun is low, and when the midges are backlit. This makes them literally shine in the air, especially if one is positioned so that the background is dark. In such circumstances, the midge gathering looks like a gathering of stardust particles, all partaking in a celestial dance.

From my perspective, “fiat” is perhaps not the right word to use in that last line, at least if the intent is to communicate experience to the world at large (as opposed to the world of practiced poets who may cheer the use of unconventional words). The common person, including the “average naturalist” to whom the poem will be incredibly meaningful (because of intimate familiarity with the phenomenon being described), will be thrown by that word. I was thrown and had to look it up, the only fiat in my vocabulary being an automobile. Yes, I stumbled on that last line and this seems out of synch with the rest of the poem, which flowed like silk. I have shared this poem numerous times with fellow naturalists, but I always feel compelled to explain that last line, knowing that others will stumble over the automobile just as I did.

Yes, when I read that wonderful third stanza, I feel that I'm back with my old friend George Herbert again.

How did we ever stray away from rhyme & meter?

For Robert Clawson
The Milky Way when seen from a clear of pollution vantagepoint is literally like a stain of milk in parts, there are so many stars it appears like clouds, even a carpet of white, it is patchy but I think those in the Northern Hemisphere forget or don't know what it's like. As for the poem, it is a marvel of the craft. For me quite slow and stately, perhaps too much so, but still wonderfully composed. I think the last line also fails, if 'fiat' was singualr perhaps, but for me 'how fair the fiats' immediately conjurs up a traffic jam in Genova.

fiat lux!!