;.cPoems, 1991, Collected:  Was You Ever Bit by a Bee?
;.l1,6,60,66,1,0,5,75,192,2,10,15,20,25,127,5,0,




                   WAS YOU EVER BIT BY A BEE?


                     Poems collected in the Winter Rains


                                     1992



                        at the Baby Face Cafe













                                                 S. Amdur


.P
POEMS AT THE END OF 1991

The gold-winged blackbirds
stopped last fall in England
to call me home.

                        Ein Gedi
                        December 20, 1991

--------
.p
.P
PO92	

gale wind over the Dead Sea
spasms of rain driven out of darkness like sand
100 children banging doors
flickering static hurls news of politicized TV peace from Bethlehem --
Signs of a stormy birth for the new year.  

Morning light:  8 Zede Yaelim
                walk across the wadi
                toward the salt-choked sea. 


                                             
                                             Ein Gedi Youth Hostel
                                             24-25.12.91

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Leila:
Black streets, cold rain
driven by a howling wind.
   "Everyone pauses, dreaming of peace" says Shlomo
    they tell us, waiting outside.

Mincha time:  snow settling like doves on orange trees
              and the Old City walls.


                                             Jerusalem
                                             31.12.91--01.01.92

----------------------------------------------------------------------
.P


The Snake, Iago, played fair
the taste was exquisite
    as evanescence
thought the cold after-glow
lonely as omniscience. 

-------

& Villon said, "Hang loose,
                Sam Johnson:
It concentrates the moment
but scatters to the mind
to the winds of terror."

----
the persistence of entropy's
apt to be good for a laugh:
Chaplin's pants, for example
that he can't keep up
or "one cat goes in, one goes out"
 ....

-------------

and animals resent
the implicit trivialization
of the hunter
's ontology
being deemed merely meat.

-----
                     
.p
TALES OF MODI'N = KIBBUTZ EIN KESEF ("SILVER SPRINGS")

"But," said Billy,
"Shlomo told me,
 'Go fly a kite.'"
"ASSUR!"  said the POLICE CHIEF
 for fear	
 you'd snaggle an electric cable
 and then complete a circuit,
     *** HEAVEN FORFEND ***     ."

----- 

"Nothing doing here.
 Would have left the week I came,
 'cept they tried to kick me out."

----------
At Kibbutz Ein Kesef ("Silver Springs") it is forbidden to bonkstanding, lest that lead to mixed dancing.

-----
"Go away, get a house, be a mensch,"
 say village citizens
 who snub and undermine each other. 

-----
Subtly mocked by their adolescent sons
middle-aged would-be mystics
do their daily prayers.

----------
`Be a darned holy town
 soon's we kick out the riff-raff.'
	'Oh Pious Ones'
     who continually invoke but rarely attend
     wishes of heavens.

------ 
Back in Babylon they said 
-- I forget just why --
'Red poppies at Modi'in'

--------
Aimiable vipers
Manichean Calvinists

------

acrobatics of comenplacencies....
----
"You don't fit in here;
PAI wants soggy-latka folk
that don't make waves.

------
Today we went out to the shooting range
but it was driving rain
so somebody asked a rabbi
and he said we could all go home,
so we did and the sun came out.
We will go back out to the shooting range
next year
if heavens permit it.

                              27.12.91

=======================================================================

Stoned on deviousness
he still shelters a candle of hope.

-----

Dreamt of rebuilding a fertile village of love and prayer
Ignore your dreams of rainbows
get what you asked for
a black-&-white highway town.

------
Crackerbarrel hassid.
'Just find a path and walk it.'

-------

How hard they work now
to clear a rational path
through Levantine poverty.

-------
Who lectured under stoa
becomes, without complaint, a menial
raising, in age, two new sons.
 
-----
[And you, ecrivan maudit
 in the Pounding noonday sun
 fancy yourself an angel.]

-----
Fired their hired watch-dog
a broken-hearted father
who then fortified his kennel.

-----
These raging infant mystics
by-pass their naively onest kindergarten rabbi
who simply goes on living.

------
Some too devious
others to honestly plain
to turn into pinned butterflies.

-----
In a moment's light onceived
vision lives thorugh decades
bent, wracked by mortality.

------
back-biting psychic swamp

-----

Portrait of the Poet by the Lawyer for a 4-year-old

"He came from way up there
 and his mind moves so fast
 you can't even see the wheels spin."

-------

Annealed in Veet-nam hells
their Empire-Builder comes
guised as a snaky locksmith.

     :OK:  who hired Ceasar?

--------

A fastidious Flemish virago
the dog-catcher's after me.

--------

Everyone's exasperated past words
at someone.
Constellation of black holes.

-----

'Distance'd', all but 'cut off'
I am welcomed at the House of Prayer
by an open-hearted dog.

-----
Sunsets shut up in her soul
flash out as lightening
who longed to buld lovely worlds.

            ------
'See much, say little.'
Wiry as Jacob, striding stones
to shelter and raise a family on sun-scourged land.

------

Sight clear as daybreak
freely she came to our tends
where men fenced her in.

   Note:  'As clear and passionate as the dawn', said Yeats.
           Daybreak is clear, dawn passionate.

---------
Let noise and dust pass by.
Plant a pardes, guard rainbows.
Fresh air from the sea.

-----
WIT's all heart
not head.

-------------


Baby-face Battle-Axe....

------------

"The only difference is,
 we're all crazy
 and know it
 and you're crazy
 and don't know it
 yet."

				 (after Bob Werz, New Buffalo, ca. '69)

---------------------------------------------------------------------
                                                                     
For four year Roy
lived like a perfect English country gentleman may
in a little 2-room cottage
with his 3 big Doberman watchdogs
in his little 2-room cottage.
One day Hai asked,
"Is that normal?"

----------------------------------------------------------------------

.p
META-POEMS, 1991

While I guarded the tavern
the bandits bought me drink
and stole my poem.


----- 
Poet, pick & catch one cloud
that blew through your mind.

----- 
`One must see many cities
 to collect a single poem,'
 quoth a diplomat.
      Zhlolp'd in the sun
      I remember my bookshelves.

    :"Treasure in heaven"

--------

The echo of silence
of an exclamation point
used by Pound.

[Ref: Imitations from the Chinese, 'The River Merchant's Wife: ALetter']

-----
One tries to pick words that fit the thought.
---------------

Leaving, the bandits dropped my poems
back into my in-basket
from their smoke rings.

-----

.p

With what reticence she visited her grandchildren
the light, then, of her life.

                   (ASA)

-----
.p

MORE TALES OF STUMBLEBUM

Stumblebum in the sun
coughing and farting and drying his toes.
"That's one happy nigger."
	Poor ol' bucket o' guts
     do you really expect
     a marble laurel wreath?
		

                16.12.91, Modi'in


----------

After so much rain
a warm winter's day --
hastily I sit in the sun
trying not to alarm it.

                 Ibid.

----------
Thrown out of his hovel,
the pottering old man arranges the kitchen
of his hosts.

                    Mevo Modi'in, 20.12.91

-----------



News Item,  Decembear 1991

The complete Buddhist scriptures
once written on palm leaves
will now be inscribed
with concentrated light
on a CD-ROM tree. 

---------

ain't read the daily news
except in the clouds

.p


Having chosen remote paths,
I'd imagined myself
exempted
from those melodramatic soap operas
     tugging along a body lop-sided
     from having glanced askance at self-betrayal



-----------
.p
TRAVEL NOTES

Cornocopia:

Descending to Tiberias
from the Central Station
one is welcomed by the goddess of the waters
seated on a magazine cover
with legs open.

-----------
.P

Old men talk simply,
sipping water after meals:
say, Klee's farewell paintings
or even Yeats
savoring ironies;
retiring bodies
pottering on
as spirit soars.

--------

possess places
tentatively
friends too

----------------


-----------------------------------------------------------------------

APHORISNS

Most people resent being saddled with minds.

-----

Men, condescending angels, demand maintenance-free bodies.

-----
dam' fag Lucifer....

[Aschenbach Drops Stock]

--------
      
