Love is in the air. The maples have completed their sugar drain. Mrs. Fox trotted through our field, fresh mouse dangling from her lips, bringing take-out home for her new family of kits. Eau de skunk perfumed my yard last night. It’s always skunk hour somewhere.

The “force that through the green fuse drives the flower” is revving up, and it’s a force to be reckoned with. In fact, it may be the universal constant, like electromagnetic force — but not subject to decay by the weak force. As beat poets and lovers know, this soggy spring-Brigadoon is just l’amor. Rural romance is revving its engine.

Suddenly the plot thickens and blooms. There are daffodils, crocuses, tulips and baby birds. Black flies, and mosquitoes as big as hummingbirds, alas. Parties and party animals abound. The bullfrog Bolero beat box begins beating.

For the biologist, it could be the gospel chorus of Pseudacris crucifers (spring peepers) pining for their native, amniotic pool wherefore to mate and lay eggs — new life and progeneration and next year’s Peeperpalooza. What’s in a name? Amphibian Tinder and wetland eHarmony are hard at work plying the customary sexy algorithm. The faster these spring frogmen sing, the better their chances to attract Ms. Right.

The wood frogs sing back-up; usually shy salamanders are feeling frisky too, making stealthy nocturnal moves. An amphibian orgy is underway. Fairy shrimp, moving even below a layer of ice, disco dance! Can Peaseblossom, Puck and Oberon be lurking far offstage? One species’ swampland is another’s Studio 54. Full moon disco ball. Big night. Yasgur’s aqua farm … “three days of peace, love and music.” But not sleep. No one sleeps tonight.

The young humans too have scheduled pool parties. Soon Juliet and her tree frog Romeo will be testing the waters and dancing. The Capulet Prom beckons. Romeo buys a ticket, suits up in a powder blue tux; Juliet gets her frock on. We English majors know those “iambic bongos” when we hear them. Iamb what iamb. Let’s boogie, Bard. Moon, croon, spoon, June — the song remains the same.

But we’re such a complicated species. Consider the inner workings of infatuation and family feuds orbiting the waters of ill-fated romance in the vernal pool of Verona. Romeo himself seems a rogue when he has the audacity to show up at the Capulet party. He too is pining: for fair Rosalind. But once he sets his peepers on Juliet’s he switches tunes. He’d rather make sweet music with Capulet’s daughter; Rosalind who? He has been zapped by maple love sugar in his very cross-gartered capillaries. “Did my heart love till now? forswear it, sight! For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night.”

Alas, human courtship does not always end as intended. It’s never a sure thing, even for peepers. Some pool prom-goers are, in fact, “star-crossed lovers,” as it turns out. Love is an endangered species; the vernal pool a perennial candidate for environmental protection. Emotional watersheds need to be secured.

And what powerful mnemonic properties might this sonic drama play in the night air wafting up the bay for the local youths of our species? It could be nothing more than a preview of the tapping of those bongos, or as grave as learning when to ignore the girl from the rival gang, keep on trucking past her father’s house, ignore the hothead cousin. Do not listen to coach Mercutio or that humming in your loins. “I wanna know what love is,” sings the wood frog through his moon roof, smelling like bait and Axe, hopped up in his bucket seat, yearning to burn rubber.

All in good time, my friend. There’s next year’s prom, and the one after that. Boom laka laka laka.

Another vernal poet gets the final word:

“sweet spring is your

time is my time is our

time for springtime is lovetime

and viva sweet love”

—E.E. Cummings

This play’s the thing. Hear the beat? Nothing more basic than love, wherever your watershed. Ribbit.