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

Even when reading, strange things take place.
Small gods turn up in the intricate details
of punctuation. The ampersand says "the sign by itself
is the word." The dots of ellipses gather together
in threes and fours, to talk of an exalted unseen presence.

I turn a page and the portly angels of Giotto float
into the room. They scrunch their pallid faces and sigh.
And great black bulls run down from the photograph
of a cave wall. They wind through corridors, stomping
with desire, horns arcing at last into light.

Once more I see Joanie Love in the shiny hoop of her bed.
Gold water flows up the tube and into her body.
Bed sores shrink back to bone, the skin on her thighs
now smooth as flannelette. She is waving from the backseat
of a car by the side of a dark road. The truck bearing down
on her makes a sudden turn.

The archives of our lives open up. Images and documents
flutter and rise, the yellowing papers of birth and death
turn white as wood pulp, reenter the trees.
We watch flat entities come to life and take flight.
Left standing at break of day, we are learning
to move about in time.

© Jan Lee Ande 2007