Pheasant and astronomers

For GTR

Burnished, finicky, picking his headbob way
across the asphalt path, into the leafy scrub
behind the twelve-pane window of our office,

we can’t not watch his colours in the sunlight.
Our measures and projections fall aside
as coarsest calculus to his most perfect curve;

so we observe.
Can such a day-star brave
the midnight sky whose glaring spectral eyes
seethe down the invert shrinkage of a telescope,

or does he sleep all clouded in the hedgerows’
straight-line rays of green restraint to roads
that sling his slow kin cockeyed in the gutter?

On foot and unconcerned, he patters out of view,
out of our world again; the sunlit room
falls just a lumen dimmer with his passing.