Dear Colleagues, you may have noticed that Richard Wilbur will be our guest lariat starting February 4 or so. I have traditionally welcomed my guests by initiating a thread at Mastery. Let's start with the title poem of Dick's latest collection, published to coincide with his 80th birthday in 2000. I have used initial dashes to indicate indentation.
Mayflies
In somber forest, when the sun was low,
I saw from unseen pools a mist of flies
— — In their quadrillions rise
And animate a ragged patch of glow
With sudden glittering—as when a crowd
— — — Of stars appear
Through a brief gap in black and driven cloud,
One arc of their great round-dance showing clear.
It was no muddled swarm I witnessed, for
In entrechats each fluttering insect there
— — Rose two steep yards in air,
Then slowly floated down to climb once more,
So that they all composed a manifold
— — — And figured scene,
And seemed the weavers of some cloth of gold,
Or the fine pistons of some bright machine.
Watching these lifelong dancers of a day
As night closed in, I felt myself alone
— — In a life too much my own,
More mortal in my separateness than they—
Unless, I thought, I had been called to be
— — — Not fly or star
But one whose task is joyfully to see
How fair the fiats of the caller are.
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