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
Last Rites
When I am dead, let my body
rest for three days.
Do not gather around me, weeping,
gnashing your teeth and sighing, to pull my soul back
into its abandoned bag of bones.
Read to me from the Book of
the Dead.
Tell me not to fear the demons: the green woman
with a bird's face, or the hungry ghosts on the yellow path.
Remind me they are merely the play of my own mind.
On the fourth day, when I am
placed upon the movable
tray before the doors to the great fire,
take off my ring, the gold band with one diamond
and the pink and green leaves. Wear it.
When you are handed the carton
of dust and bone,
do not buy a porcelain urn. Instead, sprinkle me high up
in the Cuyamaca mountains, under the spindly
branches of a scrub oak.
Look for me when you too cross
over. I will be waiting
just beyond the luminous tunnel, wearing bluejeans,
my purple shirt, heavy shoes--frantic to tell you
about the next implausible realm.
© Jan Lee Ande 2007