15 MARCH 2003
"Beware the Ides of March," a seer said
to Caesar, back when death was hand-to-hand.
This year, two hundred thousand U.S. troops
camped on Kuwaiti and Saudi sand,
each with a dog tag tucked in a boot
and a belt-packed, camouflage poncho/shroud;
and still you breathe the fluid in and out,
preparing to breathe air just months from now.
No blood relation—though you grow inside
my sister's womb, and she and I share genes—
as much the product of technology
as laser–guided bombs and M16s,
you pull us toward the future, unborn niece,
as small and fragile as the hope of peace.

                     Julie Kane
                     Natchitoches, Louisiana

THOSE SUNDAY DRIVES
You used to bore me with your monologues
on drives through old "New Awlins" neighborhoods:
what family had what house when you were young
and where some candy store or bank had stood.
Who cares about the past? I used to think.
We Yankee Irish pulled up roots a lot,
escaping relatives with chicken coops
and cabbage boiling in a kitchen pot.
But that was all before the hurricane
our Mason-Dixon love did not survive—
small loss indeed beside a thousand dead,
four houses flooded out of every five.
So much has changed: Time speeded up her clock,
and now I bore all riders with my talk.

                     Julie Kane
                     Natchitoches, Louisiana

 

CARDINAL
This time last winter I abandoned you
or, rather, left you in the hands of God
and college kids demolishing my house
while I was teaching poetry abroad.
My last day home you came to feed at dusk,
your habit, bird of shadows, too exposed
in undiluted sunlight, malformed wing
draped rakishly as a dandy's cloak.
And though, back home again, I look for you,
I know deep down that was the final time.
What else was I to do? Not go? Take you?
To cage a songird is a federal crime.
The yard is full of birds whose wings are whole,
but I can't recognize a single soul.

                     Julie Kane
                     Natchitoches, Louisiana

RISING AND FALLING
Why not say "falling out of love," the truth,
and "rising into love," like other things—
soap bubbles, dust motes, helium balloons,
and bird or Icarus or insect wings—
that yank the stupid kite strings of the heart
by catching giddy updrafs while they last
before they plummet back where all flights start
in a smooth landing or a fatal crash?
It's true: one time I logged eleven years
of soaring thermal currents fancy – free
before I saw the telltale signs appear
that meant he'd fallen out of love with me.
Don't trust the crap you read about in rhyme:
Gravity will win out every time.
                                 
                     Julie Kane
                     Natchitoches, Louisiana

USED BOOK
What luck—an open bookstore up ahead
as rain lashed awnings over Royal Street,
and then to find the books were secondhand,
with one whole wall assigned to poetry;
and then, as if that wasn't luck enough,
to find, between Jarrell and Weldon Kees,
the blue-on-cream, familiar backbone of
my chapbook, out of print since ’83—
its cover very slightly coffee–stained,
but aging (all in all) no worse than flesh
through all those cycles of the seasons since
its publication by a London press.
Then, out of luck, I read the name inside:
The man I thought would love me till I died.

                     Julie Kane
                     Natchitoches, Louisiana