Prayer to Chaos
Let the universe be random;
Let no choreographer impose
design on the dance of atoms;
Let the stars’ prophecies, the old dead light
skew past our lives;
If the lines on the palms of our hands
be life charts, let them swerve
like rivers when we touch;
no, not touch: collide.
Ode to the Big Muddy
1
Because I grew up a half-hour’s drive
from the North Atlantic, always within reach
of the dried-blood-colored cranberry bogs,
the ice-bucket water, the desolate beach
with its circular rhythms, I looked down
on linear things, so like an erection
straining against a blue-jeans zipper,
always pushing in the same direction,
spine for brains. But I have learned to mimic,
quick for a girl, the river’s predilection.
2
The first time I saw the Mississippi,
under the curving wing of a jet plane,
it lay there listless as a garden slug:
glistening, oozing, brown. Surely 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. Looking to the left, you’ll see
the Mississippi River”—so it was true.
3
Unlike the ocean, the river’s life is
right on the surface, bobbing there like turds:
a load of tourists on the Delta Queen
drunkenly singing half-remembered words
to show tunes played on steam calliope;
the push-boats nudging at oil tankers;
and nothing underneath but chicken necks
in crawfish nets, and our own dropped anchors.
The sea is our collective unconscious;
the river our blank slate, growing blanker.
4
And yet the river gathers memories:
the ugliest things grow numinous
over time—the trail of a garden slug
crystalline, opaline, luminous
when the garden slug itself has gone
as the river itself will one day go,
already trying to change its course—
an afternoon we watched the ferryboat
go back and forth until the sun went down,
skimming the water like a skipping stone.
5
Or the morning we gave back Everette’s ashes:
homeless alcoholic poet-prince.
A cold March wind was ruffling the water.
Wouldn’t you know, the ashes wouldn’t sink;
so someone jumped in to wrestle them under.
It hit me then: I didn’t want to die.
And so I made a choice, against my nature,
to throw my lot in with that moving line:
abstract, rational, conscious, sober—
cutting a path through human time.
The Maple Leaf Bar
I wanted to understand the place:
the pressed tin ceiling and the out-of-tune
piano where the late James Booker played
in a rhinestone eyepatch and purple cape.
Bottles in sunlight like Arabian jewels:
I wanted to understand the place.
Maddox asleep like a cat onstage.
Kittens asleep in the storage room.
Red Sox, Celtics, and Bruins played
in bars that kept my uncles late.
They came home singing until they puked.
I wanted to understand the Saints.
What did you think, with your boyish face,
a bar rag tucked in your blue-jeans loop,
giving me all your change to play
the jukebox with? Another cra-
zy barfly making eyes at you?
I wanted to understand the place,
to play with words like Booker played.
The Bottle Factory
The summer after high school, seventeen,
I hired on at the bottle factory
in Nutley, New Jersey, to pack the lines
spun out by middle-aged Italian women
operating 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—
simple as layering lasagna noodles.
Each time a box was full, I’d heave it
off the stand, seal the flaps with masking tape,
start over—the only real excitement
coming from running too low on boxes,
wondering whether the boy would bring more
before my bottles toppled on the floor.
I liked to watch the women twirling up
blank bottles from the bin and wedging them
between two pins, which rolled the bottle surface
under the silkscreen. Telling dirty jokes,
scratching themselves under cotton muumuus,
humming along to the theme from Tommy
(which came on right before the hourly news,
because the deejay could interrupt it),
they worked so fast their fingers were a blur.
Every so often a machine broke down,
and packer and operator had to scrub
defective bottles with acetone rags
until the maintenance man could fix it.
Nodding off to sleep from the acetone,
my rubber gloves as holey as Swiss cheese,
I drifted in and out of bottle dreams.
The day I turned eighteen, the legal age
to operate equipment in New Jersey,
the foreman put me on my own machine:
a slower model, off in a corner,
the size of a Chevrolet stood on end.
And so I turned out Wella Balsam bottles—
hair conditioner, brown and orange—
and sent them down my own conveyor belt,
humming along to the theme from Tommy.
I wasn’t fast enough to need a packer
and, anyway, it wasn’t automatic,
powered by foot pedal, moving when I moved,
a bashful, lummoxy dancing partner.
I learned to twirl each bottle for inspection,
to scrub a flyspeck from a dirty screen
with cotton rags wrung out in gasoline.
I wanted to be as fast as they were:
to break eight thousand, at least, like the slowest
worker, Delores, who stamped gold leaf
onto April Showers talc. All day I raced
my best day’s total, or her worst. Of course,
I wasn’t Italian, or middle-aged;
I didn’t live just outside of Newark
(still smoldering from last summer’s riots);
but I still longed to be good at something
physical: not words, but bottles.
I can’t explain why it seemed important
or why, for years after that, I cruised
strange drugstores looking for bottles I’d made
when love turned ugly, when words did not behave.
These poems are reprinted with permission from Julie Kane’s new book, Naked Ladies: New and Selected Poems (LSU Press, 2025).
Julie Kane’s previous poetry collections include Rhythm & Booze, winner of the National Poetry Series, and Jazz Funeral, winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize. With Grace Bauer, she co-edited Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse. A past Fulbright Scholar and Louisiana Poet Laureate, she is professor emerita at Northwestern State University, currently teaching in the Western Colorado University low-residency MFA program.
Header photo of Mardi Gras colors in downtown New Orleans by SuJo Studios, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of Julie Kane by Henrietta Wildsmith.
