Tonight's entry is about poetry and flowers. 

Yesterday I found myself staring at the ceiling in our townhome. This is not an unusual
occurrence, as I have always appreciated the pattern someone made when they first laid down the drywall, years before we bought the place. It is a flower-like pattern, very common in this area of the United States, made by pushing a large, dry, round brush into soft and wet drywall finishing. You observe the end result as a circle with non-standard lines pushing concentrically from the center toward an empty, white space. It is easy to do; even I have done it before. Yet having performed the act never took the magic out of the experience of gazing into it in the afternoon.

That day, though, something felt a little different. I could not tell what it was, the sort of converse effect of what Feijoo called the "yo no sé qué" (back before I spoke enough French to know from where he had taken the phrase); without better clarity I could not move intellectually from that spot.

I then remembered something I had written in my first short book of poems:

Through the street we walk, you and I,
Talking of strange things, holding hands
While the red lights and their merchandise entice us

As would the nicotine in the walls of an old bar
Whose darkness and four-sides enclosing me chill my mind,
Or as would the silence of novocaine on your lips
That makes skin tingle and sensation die
While the red lights and their merchandise cry out to us.
(New Poems from the Airplane and Graveyard, 12)  

When I first wrote these verses, back before I even know this house existed, I meant them as a comment on how the spaces we have occupied can freeze us in a single moment, not allowing us to escape. Such a place in memory keeps us from moving forward, even making love sour through not letting go of the past.

Yet when I re-read these verses today I realized that I had, even the day I wrote the words, lost the duplicity of their meaning. The connotation of enticement is a negative one; we need not of the thing that entices us. The red lights, in fact, were a reference to a brief stay in Amsterdam ... I was more than taken by surprise with what windows showing red lights were actually selling. An effect of the numbing sensation in the poem is that the poetic subject no longer desires to walk among those red lights; in a related way, what could trap him may actually free him.

Tonight I looked up at those repeating patterns again with silent delight. I was glad I could again smell the flowers.