Tavern doors open. Grab and hustle of the street. The small room of his life. The darkening sky. I think of Mozart folding and unfolding his napkin as the notes sound in his head.
Sparrows bicker overhead.
Screed of the grinder, the bandsaw's groan and wail. In his boredom the boy in Diderot studies again through the shop's open door the buttresses of Suger's cathedral and imagines the young Leonardo in his apprenticeship staring through the window at Brunelleschi's dome, solid yet miraculous, a resurrected body, floating above the city. Outside, a cowbird cries, flapping up from the pipe rack, the ruffling of wings like a quilt flung over a bed. Snow settles on the tops of cans, black rings in a white field. The stock, cut clean, gleams under lamplight.