Flicker is laughing at you. His piercing kyeew through bare branches is the punch line your question requested. You didn’t want the answer. Only experience can answer. Other teachers only recall or anticipate. So flicker is laughing at you. Who wanted to be heard in the concrete jungle chorus, calling for what you need before you know it, know them, who hold your spark of belonging and all those already bound up in it. Flicker laughs not in the forest now, but in trash bin driveway strips with plants growing purely by accident. His engorged pigeon-like silhouette quivers, almost a disappearance, so melodically erratic, revealing the gray breast dappled with black. A scarlet petal blooms like sunburn on back of the neck, recalling Pileated Woodpecker, the showier relative, more photographed, cackling in cartoons, and perhaps less at peace for the attention. Flicker can fly under the radar, Flicker you could look past in the thicket, like he and Wren do in the driveway, looking for dinner, even if they have to farm Worms from power lines. So Flicker turns, little by little, like a Phoenix slowed down so our eyes can follow a trick of the light we live off.