i'm visiting kate. she lives atop a fine art gallery (turtle gallery is its name) in bust-lush maine. old, white farmhouse, stately and solid, with a wood-burning stove and plenty of windows. the paintings scattered about are good; there's sculpture in the front and back yards; and the place smells like a flower orgy's taking place in a painter's studio. we aren't sleeping quite enough; i'm reading paul tillich like he's a self-help guru; kate's making many a raunchy and inapporpriate religious joke (insert laugh track here--she is really so very, very funny); and i'm pretending i don't have bangs.
last night, we went to haystack, which is an art/craftschool here in deer isle, for a slide show presentation of the instructors' artwork. before the show, stuart kestenbaum read three poems of the breath-catching variety. here is one of them (from his collection, "house of thanksgiving"):

The Light

A Camel-smoking teenager I have returned
from New York City with my friend
Ellen, she of the wispy blonde
hair in her eyes and the sophisticated
laugh, when a moth dives deep
into my throat, so that I can't
talk or swallow. We are on the way
to her house, for what I pray will be
love and I can't even tell her
what has happened, I just
stand there in the mercury vapor
light on South Orange Avenue
until we part and I walk home.
The day in New York with the visits
to her genteel friends,
the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
and Art Students League and the
exotic promise of the train station
all behind us, I knew I just wanted
a girl to put in my life to make
me whole and instead I swallow
a moth, the brown and white
moth that circles endlessly around
the glow, that can burn itself on the
candle of desire. It must have been
after the light that was
inside me, the light that
even after all these years
I have not yet seen or understood.

thanks, stuart.

peace to all you light-makers out there from a hungry brown and white moth,
reva