Not of mine, lucky you. Kristen Case won the 2004 Iowa Award for poetry. And I keep coming back to two of her poems.

Housework

The years have cleared now and left you here,
two flights above the street, in a square room
you sweep every afternoon, amazed, always,
at the tenacity of dust. Life is, mostly,
a series of imagined imperatives:
the law of sleeping and the law of snow;
cleaning, each morning, the plates,
the clothes from the floor,
whatever the huge tide has left behind.
It is, none of it, necessary:
not the stacks of dishes in the cupboard,
not the newspaper,
not the elaborate occasion of your coffee.
All this (even love, the great wave of it
rising now, above your life) is made. Start
by emptying.

Critique of Pure Reason

When I met you, I turned you over and over in my head,
trying to know what you meant.

Once, looking at you, a word
wrote itself on my mind.

The sense we make of things
(space, time, causation)
is, according to Kant,
a function of the mind’s ordering impulse,
rather than a function of the world.

What is this? I said. You said, I’ll tell you what
it isn’t.

Kant’s early work deals exclusively
with hurricanes and winds.

Your talk is like religion.
It means everything and nothing.

Act without regard to any end, Kant instructs.
Act as if the maxim of your action
were to become through your will a general law.

The maxims of your actions were terrifying.

You told me you had sex for the first time when you were five.

That’s not sex, I said.

It felt like sex.

Silence. Wind lifting the leaves outside.

Central to The Critique of Pure Reason is Kant’s belief
in the unknowableness of things in themselves.

The word was: pain.

I am painting you a picture, you said.