Two deep rivers ran
through the heart of town to the Bay,
and in March I watched the ice break up
and the big floes go tumbling, splintering
the peirs, debarking the oaks and pines
along the banks four feet up their trunks.
In April, the first thunder
in six months, proclaiming
spring, and in July
up from the Bay, from beyond
Peet's Slough and Long Tail Point
and the marsh meadows blue
with sweet flag the hatch came,
a fly or two fluttering
to the street lights, than a few more, then
before you knew it
the mayflies of Green Bay would be swarming up
the Fox in hugh rustling clouds half as wide
as the river, so many they darkened the arc lights
on the Blue Jays' field, covered
every window pane, clustered the screens, clogged
car radiators, covered your hat, your sleeves,
sometimes even brought traffic
to a halt. You could feel their wings
brushing your face with little breezes
that I swear were enough
to cool you down on a hot night, the air
adazzle with wings, and high
in the evening sky swallows
by the hundreds, cedar waxwings
darting out from the trees to meet a fly
just perfectly in mid flight, one second
this llittle fluttery dab of golden light,
then the flash and hover
of the bird, then
nothing,
like a flicked switch, the evening gone
minutely the darker for it.
If it had been raining
the streets and sidewalks in the morning
would be slippery with a green slime
of eggs, the flies having mistaken
the wet concrete for a surface
of live water. But nothing
like it anymore, the hatch
is over, probably
forever, the Bay a soup
of silt and sewage and sulfides
from the mills, not even clean
enough to swim in anymore. But back then
those summer evening - I can still
hear it, the sound
like a long train
way off in the distance,
a sort of humming rumble
wrought up by those millions
billions, of delicate wings
that caught up every last scrap of light
left to the day in the last
half hour as night came down
and the street lamps
came on. I've never forgotten
how it was those years in July
the night stepping in, slow
and deliberate as a heron, the sky
softly darkening like it does
even now, evenings
in late summer, a smell
of lawns and dust and the steely
scent of the Bay drifting in, the air
still hot, but a growing softness
to everything - at such a time
you could surprise
yourself, catch sight of yourself
in a shop window, if the time
was right, and the mayflies
hadn't yet swarmed the glass, and depending
on how you wanted to look to yourself,
in such a light you'd look it. ~ John Engles