HouseworkAuthor(s): Kristen CaseSource: The Iowa Review, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Winter, 2004/2005), p. 23Published by: University of IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20151887 .

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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.

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