Jan Lee Ande

Selected poems from
Instructions for Walking on Water

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Last Rites | Nothing is What it Seems to Be | I Want to Live as a Magician

It is not easy to move about on this earth with crumpled
wings, a fractured heart, my little
bundle of tricks.

I wake to sunlight flickering through palm fronds.
Some days the heckling sun has questions, the light
confused if it is particle or wave.

I sit with crossed legs on a cushion made of kapok.
My mind can see the cottony blossoms
strung at the ends of branches.

How many trees fall in the rainforest between two
breaths? How do the silky fibers smell,
burning to ash in the balmy air?

I keep a collection of photographs in rosewood frames:
Rimbaud dressed like a seer,
the Blessed Virgin crying blood red tears,

a Chinese soldier with his machine gun.
He stood at Khodari, closing down the border to Tibet.
I traveled there by truck from Katmandu.

Each deep bow of my body that day was for the Buddha
and the soldier. Sliding onto frozen soil, touching
my forehead to the ground,

my thirty three grand prostrations made him angry,
and the sandalwood mala, wrapped
like a rosary around my wrist.

If Whitman says our very being can become a poem,
then anything is possible. The same energy
that spins in reactors burns a gaunt body onto the shroud.

I will plant ten thousand trees, make real rabbits
out of my fingers and thumb, pull a host of doves
from my pocket and perch them on blooming branches.

© Jan Lee Ande 2007