He’d always heard them,
Not voices per se, but kinescope snippets
Bereft of context or continuity,
Peripheral visions of Yeatsian sprites
Sepia-toned silent vignettes
Of vaulted ceilings and high-backed chairs,
Their presence exacerbated by a lack of counterbalance
(His children long since putting this place
Squarely in the rear-view mirror,
His wife sprinkled hither and yon in the back yard)
Giving them an unwanted prominence
In his relatively tumbledown existence
And on one morning somewhere near
The handoff of gray February
To its somewhat more promising successor
(Such things as times and dates
More or less extraneous minutiae to him at this point,
As he’d become more attuned
To changes in the light upon waking and settling his days,
The frequency and sounds of the transitory geese,
Sounding for all the world like disappointed suitors
Found wanting by the fickle maiden
Of this plane of existence)
He’d stepped outside and viewed
What appeared to be a robin,
But in a color not of its species,
Perhaps not of any spectrum known to our kind,
And though it seemed somewhat familiar,
Perhaps from some childhood fever dream
Or bacchanalian teen misadventure,
It stopped him in his tracks,
So much so that his neighbor,
His primary interaction with his fellow man,
A mixed blessing at best
Leaned out his front door
(Partly concerned and mostly amused)
And shouted Firs’ robin of Spring, Buster,
Not your first and mebbe not your last.
And Buster, shaken back to whatever it had been,
Regarded his neighbor with an approximation of a smile,
And retorted Be OK if you were right
Just this one time, I reckon.