Like the workshop of a carpenter,
the wiry sky is full of buzz-saws,
and our love is a wood panel, split
in half after the walls of our home were pried off
by the crowbars of water
after the levees broke.
Our bodies are full of cats and dogs:
none of them have a home,
only images: on TV, cyberspace, or papers
stapled into telephone poles
fractured like my brother’s leg
after a bombing in downtown Baghdad.
Shaggy-haired volunteers descend
on the streets.
Scratched hammers peek out of rusty tool boxes,
as if eyeing the packages of nails stacked on front stoops.
They are silvery,
a new kind of punctuation;
upside-down periods and exclamation points
for the revised essay of our digs,
the structure of fresh air
we might breathe and speak again.