Prayer to Chaos
Let the universe be random;
Let no choreographer impose
design on the dance of atoms;
Let the celebs’ prophecies, the previous lifeless mild
skew previous our lives;
If the traces on the palms of our arms
be life charts, allow them to swerve
like rivers once we contact;
no, not contact: collide.
Ode to the Massive Muddy
1
As a result of I grew up a half-hour’s drive
from the North Atlantic, at all times inside attain
of the dried-blood-colored cranberry bogs,
the ice-bucket water, the desolate seashore
with its round rhythms, I appeared down
on linear issues, so like an erection
straining in opposition to a blue-jeans zipper,
at all times pushing in the identical route,
backbone for brains. However I’ve discovered to imitate,
fast for a lady, the river’s predilection.
2
The primary time I noticed the Mississippi,
underneath the curving wing of a jet aircraft,
it lay there listless as a backyard slug:
glistening, oozing, brown. Certainly Mark Twain’s
paddlewheel visions, Hart Crane’s hosannas
to the Gulf, Muddy Waters’s delta blues
hadn’t sprung forth from a drainage canal?
“Fasten your seatbelts for descent into
New Orleans. Trying to the left, you’ll see
the Mississippi River”—so it was true.
3
Not like the ocean, the river’s life is
proper on the floor, bobbing there like turds:
a load of vacationers on the Delta Queen
drunkenly singing half-remembered phrases
to indicate tunes performed on steam calliope;
the push-boats nudging at oil tankers;
and nothing beneath however hen necks
in crawfish nets, and our personal dropped anchors.
The ocean is our collective unconscious;
the river our clean slate, rising blanker.
4
And but the river gathers recollections:
the ugliest issues develop numinous
over time—the path of a backyard slug
crystalline, opaline, luminous
when the backyard slug itself has gone
because the river itself will in the future go,
already attempting to alter its course—
a day we watched the ferryboat
trip till the solar went down,
skimming the water like a skipping stone.
5
Or the morning we gave again Everette’s ashes:
homeless alcoholic poet-prince.
A chilly March wind was ruffling the water.
Wouldn’t you realize, the ashes wouldn’t sink;
so somebody jumped in to wrestle them underneath.
It hit me then: I didn’t need to die.
And so I made a selection, in opposition to my nature,
to throw my lot in with that transferring line:
summary, rational, aware, sober—
slicing a path by human time.
The Maple Leaf Bar
I wished to grasp the place:
the pressed tin ceiling and the out-of-tune
piano the place the late James Booker performed
in a rhinestone eyepatch and purple cape.
Bottles in daylight like Arabian jewels:
I wished to grasp the place.
Maddox asleep like a cat onstage.
Kittens asleep within the storage room.
Crimson Sox, Celtics, and Bruins performed
in bars that saved my uncles late.
They got here dwelling singing till they puked.
I wished to grasp the Saints.
What did you assume, together with your boyish face,
a bar rag tucked in your blue-jeans loop,
giving me all of your change to play
the jukebox with? One other cra-
zy barfly making eyes at you?
I wished to grasp the place,
to play with phrases like Booker performed.
The Bottle Manufacturing unit
The summer season after highschool, seventeen,
I employed on on the bottle manufacturing facility
in Nutley, New Jersey, to pack the traces
spun out by middle-aged Italian ladies
working silkscreen machines. The work
was dumb: unfold a cardboard carton, place it
upright on a stand, insert a spacer,
pack a tier of tiny eyedrop bottles,
roof the bottles with a sheet of cardboard—
easy as layering lasagna noodles.
Every time a field was full, I’d heave it
off the stand, seal the flaps with masking tape,
begin over—the one actual pleasure
coming from operating too low on packing containers,
questioning whether or not the boy would convey extra
earlier than my bottles toppled on the ground.
I favored to observe the ladies twirling up
clean bottles from the bin and wedging them
between two pins, which rolled the bottle floor
underneath the silkscreen. Telling soiled jokes,
scratching themselves underneath cotton muumuus,
buzzing alongside to the theme from Tommy
(which got here on proper earlier than the hourly information,
as a result of the deejay might interrupt it),
they labored so quick their fingers had been a blur.
Sometimes a machine broke down,
and packer and operator needed to scrub
faulty bottles with acetone rags
till the upkeep man might repair it.
Nodding off to sleep from the acetone,
my rubber gloves as holey as Swiss cheese,
I drifted out and in of bottle goals.
The day I turned eighteen, the authorized age
to function tools in New Jersey,
the foreman put me alone machine:
a slower mannequin, off in a nook,
the dimensions of a Chevrolet stood on finish.
And so I turned out Wella Balsam bottles—
hair conditioner, brown and orange—
and despatched them down my very own conveyor belt,
buzzing alongside to the theme from Tommy.
I wasn’t quick sufficient to wish a packer
and, anyway, it wasn’t computerized,
powered by foot pedal, transferring once I moved,
a bashful, lummoxy dancing companion.
I discovered to twirl every bottle for inspection,
to wash a flyspeck from a unclean display screen
with cotton rags wrung out in gasoline.
I wished to be as quick as they had been:
to interrupt eight thousand, no less than, just like the slowest
employee, Delores, who stamped gold leaf
onto April Showers talc. All day I raced
my finest day’s whole, or her worst. In fact,
I wasn’t Italian, or middle-aged;
I didn’t reside simply outdoors of Newark
(nonetheless smoldering from final summer season’s riots);
however I nonetheless longed to be good at one thing
bodily: not phrases, however bottles.
I can’t clarify why it appeared necessary
or why, for years after that, I cruised
unusual drugstores on the lookout for bottles I’d made
when love turned ugly, when phrases didn’t behave.
These poems are reprinted with permission from Julie Kane’s new ebook, Bare Women: New and Chosen Poems (LSU Press, 2025).
Julie Kane’s earlier poetry collections embody Rhythm & Booze, winner of the Nationwide Poetry Collection, and Jazz Funeral, winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize. With Grace Bauer, she co-edited Nasty Girls Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse. A previous Fulbright Scholar and Louisiana Poet Laureate, she is professor emerita at Northwestern State College, at the moment educating within the Western Colorado College low-residency MFA program.
Header picture of Mardi Gras colours in downtown New Orleans by SuJo Studios, courtesy Shutterstock. Picture of Julie Kane by Henrietta Wildsmith.
