Things start with fire, or else with music.
Some of us are at the restaurant where the bird got in,
and some of us are elsewhere, and anyway
that was another occasion, some other evening.

Outside, crowds of young people are cheering.
They do this every afternoon here,
about this time. I hear their voices more clearly
when I open the windows, but I still don't know
what they're shouting, or to whom.

In the dream I keep having
I wind up dismantling my desk, only to find
it's constructed not of human bodies, as I'd feared,
but rather out of small slivers of glass
in the shapes of bones. Every time
I hold a fragment up to the light
I see something different: an empty sleigh
being pulled across a dark, snow-studded landscape;
a Bedouin market in ruins; two little girls
holding hands with their backs to the camera.

Maybe the crickets aren't trying
to make music. Maybe they're trying to thread
their own legs together, make something
larger than themselves. Or maybe they're trying
to kindle something, steel against flint.

After the fire, November was a surgeon's voice.
The time the bird got in the restaurant
we all thought it was funny.
There was music for the war to dance to, if it wanted.
Our faces were still painted, from the parade.