Owl House Quotes

Death’s a funny thing. I used to think it was a big, sudden thing, like a huge owl that would swoop down out of the night and carry you off. I don’t anymore. I think it’s a slow thing. Like a thief who comes to your house day after day, taking a little thing here and a little thing there, and one day you walk round your house and there’s nothing there to keep you, nothing to make you want to stay. And then you lie down and shut up forever. Lots of little deaths until the last big one.

Their house had real hard-cover books in it, and you often saw them lying open on the sofa, the words still warm from being read.

Chills run down my spine as our fingers intwine And your sighs harmonize with mine Unmistakably I can still feel your heart Beat fast when you dance with me.

When we asked Pooh what the opposite of an Introduction was, he said "The what of a what?" which didn't help us as much as we had hoped, but luckily Owl kept his head and told us that the Opposite of an Introduction, my dear Pooh, was a Contradiction; and, as he is very good at long words, I am sure that that's what it is.

I felt a throb between my legs. I glared down at my Cock. Hold your fucking horses, I muttered. God...fuck was this seriously my life? Stalking a girl I'd met online, parked outside her house at midnight, speaking to my dick?

Circle me and the needle moves gracefully Back and forth, if my heart was a compass you'd be North Risk it all cause I'll catch you if you fall Wherever you go, if my heart was a house you'd be home.

Owl explained about the Necessary Dorsal Muscles. He had explained this to Pooh and Christopher Robin once before and had been waiting for a chance to do it again, because it is a thing you can easily explain twice before anybody knows what you are talking about.

Owl," said Rabbit shortly, "you and I have brains. The others have fluff. If there is any thinking to be done in this Forest--and when I say thinking I mean thinking--you and I must do it.

It makes me smile because you said it best I would clearly feel blessed if the sun rose up from the west.

That's right. You'll like Owl. He flew past a day or two ago and noticed me. He didn't actually say anything, mind you, but he knew it was me. Very friendly of him. Encouraging." Pooh and Piglet shuffled about a little and said, "Well, good-bye, Eeyore" as lingeringly as they could, but they had a long way to go, and wanted to be getting on. "Good-bye," said Eeyore. "Mind you don't get blown away, little Piglet. You'd be missed. People would say `Where's little Piglet been blown to?' -- really wanting to know. Well, good-bye. And thank you for happening to pass me.

Christopher Robin was home by this time, because it was the afternoon, and he was so glad to see them that they stayed there until very nearly tea-time, and then they had a Very Nearly tea, which is one you forget about afterwards, and hurried on to Pooh Corner, so as to see Eeyore before it was too late to have a Proper Tea with Owl.

ENTER THIS DESERTED HOUSE But please walk softly as you do. Frogs dwell here and crickets too. Ain't no ceiling, only blue Jays dwell here and sunbeams too. Floors are flowers - take a few. Ferns grow here and daisies too. Whoosh, swoosh - too-whit, too-woo, Bats dwell here and hoot owls too. Ha-ha-ha,hee-hee,hoo-hoooo, Gnomes dwell here and goblins too. And my child, I thought you knew I dwell here...and so do you.

Owl,' said Rabbit shortly, 'you and I have brains. The others have fluff. If there is easy thinking to be done in this Forest - and when I say thinking I mean thinking - you and I must do it.

I don't know how these couples do it, spend hours each night tucking their kids in, reading them books about misguided kittens or seals who wear uniforms, and then reread them if the child so orders. In my house, our parents put us to bed with two simple words: "Shut up." That was always the last thing we heard before our lights were turned off. Our artwork did not hang on the refrigerator or anywhere near it, because our parents recognized it for what it was: crap. They did not live in a child's house, we lived in theirs.

Is the soul solid, like iron? Or is it tender and breakable, like the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl.

Owl looked at him, and wondered whether to push him off the tree; but, feeling that he could always do it afterwards, he tried once more to find out what they were talking about.

I'm trained as an architect; writing is like architecture. In buildings, there are design motifs that occur again and again, that repeat -- patterns, curves. These motifs help us feel comfortable in a physical space. And the same works in writing, I've found. For me, the way words, punctuation and paragraphs fall on the page is important as well -- the graphic design of the language. That was why the words and thoughts of Estha and Rahel, the twins, were so playful on the page ... I was being creative with their design. Words were broken apart, and then sometimes fused together. "Later" became "Lay. Ter." "An owl" became "A Nowl." "Sour metal smell" became "sourmetal smell." Repetition I love, and used because it made me feel safe. Repeated words and phrases have a rocking feeling, like a lullaby. They help take away the shock of the plot -- death, lives destroyed or the horror of the settings -- a crazy, chaotic, emotional house, the sinister movie theater.

There is only a black fence and a wide field and a barn of Wyeth red. The smell of anger chokes the air. Ravens of September rain descend. Some say a mad mad hermit man lived here talking to himself and the woodchuck. But he's gone. No reason. No sense. He just wandered off one day, past the onions, past the fence. Forget the letters. Forget love. Troy is nothing more than a black finger of charcoal frozen in lake ice. And near where the owl watches and the old bear dreams, the parapet of memory burns to the ground taking heaven with it.

If there'd been anything decent in the house, anything approaching real ice cream, it would have been eaten long ago. I knew this, so I bypassed the freezer in the kitchen and the secondary freezer in the toolshed and went to the neglected, tundralike one in the basement. Behind the chickens bought years earlier on sale, and the roasts encased like chestnuts in blood-tinted frost, I found a tub of ice milk, vanilla-flavored, and the color of pus. It had been frozen for so long that even I, a child, was made to feel old by the price tag. "Thirty-five cents! You can't get naught for that nowadays!

THE MOON AND THE YEW TREE This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue. The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God, Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility. Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place Separated from my house by a row of headstones. I simply cannot see where there is to get to. The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right, White as a knuckle and terribly upset. It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here. Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection. At the end, they soberly bong out their names. The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape. The eyes lift after it and find the moon. The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary. Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls. How I would like to believe in tenderness The face of the effigy, gentled by candles, Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes. I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering Blue and mystical over the face of the stars. Inside the church, the saints will be all blue, Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews, Their hands and faces stiff with holiness. The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild. And the message of the yew tree is blackness -- blackness and silence. --written 22 October 1961

Well, did Owl always have a letter-box in his ceiling?” “Has he?” “Yes, look.” “I can’t,” said Pooh. “I’m face downwards under something, and that, Piglet, is a very bad position for looking at ceilings.” “Well, he has, Pooh.” “Perhaps he’s changed it,” said Pooh. “Just for a change.

shapeshifter poems by Lucille Clifton 1 the legend is whispered in the women's tent how the moon when she rises full follows some men into themselves and changes them there the season is short but dreadful shapeshifters they wear strange hands they walk through the houses at night their daughters do not know them 2 who is there to protect her from the hands of the father not the windows which see and say nothing not the moon that awful eye not the woman she will become with her scarred tongue who who who the owl laments into the evening who will protect her this prettylittlegirl 3 if the little girl lies still enough shut enough hard enough shapeshifter may not walk tonight the full moon may not find him here the hair on him bristling rising up 4 the poem at the end of the world is the poem the little girl breathes into her pillow the one she cannot tell the one there is no one to hear this poem is a political poem is a war poem is a universal poem but is not about these things this poem is about one human heart this poem is the poem at the end of the world Credit: Copyright © 1987 by Lucille Clifton.

A witch there was, who webs could weave to snare the heart and wits to reave, who span dark spells with spider-craft, and as she span she softly laughed; a drink she brewed of strength and dread to bind the quick and stir the dead. In a cave she housed where winging bats their harbour sought, and owls and cats from hunting came with mournful cries, night-stalking near with needle eyes.

For the author as for God, standing outwith his creation, all times are one; all times are now. In mine own country, we accept as due and right – as very meet, right, and our bounden duty – the downs and their orchids and butterflies, the woods and coppices, ash, beech, oak, and field maple, rowan, wild cherry, holly, and hazel, bluebells in their season and willow, alder, and poplar in the wetter ground. We accept as proper and unremarkable the badger and the squirrel, the roe deer and the rabbit, the fox and the pheasant, as the companions of our walks and days. We remark with pleasure, yet take as granted, the hedgerow and the garden, the riot of snowdrops, primroses, and cowslips, the bright flash of kingfishers, the dart of swallows and the peaceful homeliness of house martins, the soft nocturnal glimmer of glow worm and the silent nocturnal swoop of owl.

These were the distractions I had to choose from. There were no other lights burning downtown after nine o'clock. On starlight nights I used to pace up and down those long, cold streets, scowling at the little, sleeping houses on either side, with their storm-windows and covered back porches. They were flimsy shelters, most of them poorly built of light wood, with spindle porch-posts horribly mutilated by the turning-lathe. Yet for all their frailness, how much jealousy and envy and unhappiness some of them managed to contain! The life that went on in them seemed to me made up of evasions and negations; shifts to save cooking, to save washing and cleaning, devices to propitiate the tongue of gossip. This guarded mode of existence was like living under a tyranny. People's speech, their voices, their very glances, became furtive and repressed. Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution. The people asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens; to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark. The growing piles of ashes and cinders in the back yards were the only evidence that the wasteful, consuming process of life went on at all. On Tuesday nights the Owl Club danced; then there was a little stir in the streets, and here and there one could see a lighted window until midnight. But the next night all was dark again.

Matt had his back to the house and his hands braced against a black Lexus. Holy fuck. This was textbook sketchy. Black car, strange man, middle of the night. Maybe I was about to be abducted. Maybe I was about to become one of those news stories that makes people say, “I feel bad for the girl, but she was asking for trouble.

cowering in their houses like rabbits in a burrow, and dare the Forest themselves again.

I speak in tongues, my audience is owls. My audience is God, because who the hell else could understand me? Who else has been dead twice?

They did not live in a child’s house, we lived in theirs.

But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there. Isaiah 13:21

I Leave This at Your Ear For When You Wake" I leave this at your ear for when you wake, A creature in its abstract cage asleep. Your dreams blindfold you by the light they make. The owl called from the naked-woman tree As I came down by the Kyle farm to hear Your house silent by the speaking sea. I have come late but I have come before Later with slaked steps from stone to stone To hope to find you listening for the door. I stand in the ticking room. My dear, I take A moth kiss from your breath. The shore gulls cry. I leave this at your ear for when you wake.

Until this moment I had considered myself the most miserable creature in the world. Now I realised that in the rubble of those villages and ponderous brick houses built on the mountain, people had lived whose bones were now putrefied, and bits and pieces of their bodies endured in purple water lilies. Among these people, maybe there existed one cursed painter, one blighted painter, a pathetic maker of pen cases, just like me.

He took the sacramental chalice, and stretching forth his bare arm, cried in a loud voice, 'Come ye viewless ministers of this dread hour! come from the fenny lake, the hanging rock, and the midnight cave! The moon is red - the stars are out - the sky is burning - and all nature stands aghast at what we do!' Then replacing the sacred vessel on the altar, he drew, one by one, from different parts of his body, from his knotted hair, from his bosom, from beneath his nails, the unholy things which he cast into it. 'This,' said he, 'I plucked from the beak of a raven feeding on a murderer's brains! This is the mad dog's foam! These the spurgings of a dead man's eyes, gathered since the rising of the evening star! This is a screech-owl's egg! This a single drop of black blood, squeezed from the heart of a sweltered toad! This, an adder's tongue! And here, ten grains of the gray moss that grew upon a skull which had lain in the charnel-house three hundred years! What! Not yet?' And his eyes seemed like balls of fire as he cast them upwards. 'Not yet? I call ye once! I call ye twice! Dare ye deny me! Nay, then, as I call ye thrice, I'll wound mine arm, and as it drops, I'll breathe a spell shall cleave the ground and drag you here!' ("The Forsaken Of God")

In court, pricey lawyers from the city try to answer the question: whose life is more endangered, the spotted owl’s or the logger’s? Victims of mutual incompatibility, both owl and logger are disappearing in Oregon, a state that once had enough standing timber to rebuild every house in America.

The bluish, pale face of the house rises above me like a wall of ice and the distant, solitary barking of an owl floats toward me. I half close my eyes. Over the damp dark of the garden flowers swing back and forth like small balloons. The solemn trees, each buried in a cloud of leaves, seem lost in sleep. It is late. I like in the grass, smoking, feeling at ease, pretending the end will be like this. Moonlight falls on my flesh. A breeze circles my wrist. I drift. I shiver. I know that soon the day will come to wash away the moon's white stain, that I shall walk in the morning sun invisible as anyone.

At childhood’s end, the houses petered out into playing fields, the factory, allotments kept, like mistresses, by kneeling married men, the silent railway line, the hermit’s caravan, till you came at last to the edge of the woods. It was there that I first clapped eyes on the wolf. He stood in a clearing, reading his verse out loud in his wolfy drawl, a paperback in his hairy paw, red wine staining his bearded jaw. What big ears he had! What big eyes he had! What teeth! In the interval, I made quite sure he spotted me, sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif, and bought me a drink, my first. You might ask why. Here’s why. Poetry. The wolf, I knew, would lead me deep into the woods, away from home, to a dark tangled thorny place lit by the eyes of owls. I crawled in his wake, my stockings ripped to shreds, scraps of red from my blazer snagged on twig and branch, murder clues. I lost both shoes but got there, wolf’s lair, better beware. Lesson one that night, breath of the wolf in my ear, was the love poem. I clung till dawn to his thrashing fur, for what little girl doesn’t dearly love a wolf? Then I slid from between his heavy matted paws and went in search of a living bird – white dove – which flew, straight, from my hands to his hope mouth. One bite, dead. How nice, breakfast in bed, he said, licking his chops. As soon as he slept, I crept to the back of the lair, where a whole wall was crimson, gold, aglow with books. Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head, warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood. But then I was young – and it took ten years in the woods to tell that a mushroom stoppers the mouth of a buried corpse, that birds are the uttered thought of trees, that a greying wolf howls the same old song at the moon, year in, year out, season after season, same rhyme, same reason. I took an axe to a willow to see how it wept. I took an axe to a salmon to see how it leapt. I took an axe to the wolf as he slept, one chop, scrotum to throat, and saw the glistening, virgin white of my grandmother’s bones. I filled his old belly with stones. I stitched him up. Out of the forest I come with my flowers, singing, all alone. Little Red-Cap

Anyway, she loved horses a lot, my mother. When she was growing up she had a horse she said got lonely sometimes? and he liked to come right up to the house and put his head in at the window to see what was going on. “What was his name? “Paintbox.” I’d loved it when my mother told me about the stables back in Kansas: owls and bats in the rafters, horses nickering and blowing. I knew the names of all her childhood horses and dogs. Paintbox! Was he all different colors? “He was spotted, sort of. I’ve seen pictures of him. Sometimes—in the summer—he’d come and look in on her while she was having her afternoon nap. She could hear him breathing, you know, just inside the curtains.

Pa always stopped telling the story here, and waited until Laura said: “Go on, Pa! Please go on.” “Well,” Pa said, “then your Grandpa went out into the yard and cut a stout switch. And he came back into the house and gave me a good thrashing, so that I would remember to mind him after that. “‘A big boy nine years old is old enough to remember to mind,’ he said. ‘There’s a good reason for what I tell you to do,’ he said, ‘and if you’ll do as you’re told, no harm will come to you.’” “Yes, yes, Pa!” Laura would say, bouncing up and down on Pa’s knee. “And then what did he say?” “He said, ‘If you’d obeyed me, as you should, you wouldn’t have been out in the Big Woods after dark, and you wouldn’t have been scared by a screech-owl.

It was the Age of Anything-Can-Happen, he reminded himself. He had heard many people say that on TV and on the outré video clips floating in cyberspace, which added a further, new-technology depth to his addiction. There were no rules any more. And in the Age of Anything-Can-Happen, well, anything could happen. Old friends could become new enemies and traditional enemies could be your new besties or even lovers. It was no longer possible to predict the weather, or the likelihood of war, or the outcome of elections. A woman might fall in love with a piglet, or a man start living with an owl. A beauty might fall asleep and, when kissed, wake up speaking a different language and in that new language reveal a completely altered character. A flood might drown your city. A tornado might carry your house to a faraway land where, upon landing, it would squash a witch. Criminals could become kings and kings be unmasked as criminals. A man might discover that the woman he lived with was his father’s illegitimate child. A whole nation might jump off a cliff like swarming lemmings. Men who played presidents on TV could become presidents. The water might run out. A woman might bear a baby who was found to be a revenant god. Words could lose their meanings and acquire new ones. The world might end, as at least one prominent scientist- entrepreneur had begun repeatedly to predict. An evil scent would hang over the ending. And a TV star might miraculously return the love of a foolish old coot, giving him an unlikely romantic triumph which would redeem a long, small life, bestowing upon it, at the last, the radiance of majesty.

Maybe death isn’t darkness at all, but so much light wrapping itself around us — as soft as feathers — that we are instantly weary of looking, and looking, and shut our eyes, not without amazement, and let ourselves be carried, as through the translucence of mica to the river that is without the least dapple or shadow — that is nothing but light — scalding, aortal light — in which we are washed and washed out of our bones. “White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field,” House of Light (1990)

Hang care!' exclaimed he. 'This is, a delicious evening; the wine has a finer relish here than in the house, and the song is more exciting and melodious under the tranquil sky than in the close room, where sound is stifled. Come, let us have a bacchanalian chant - let us, with old Sir Toby, make the welkin dance, and rouse the night-owl with a catch. I am right merry. Pass the bottle, and tune your voices - a catch, a catch! The lights will be here anon.' ("The Haunted House Of Paddington")

That’s how our eyes face, too. Primates are not ambush predators but largely vegetarian browsers, and we’ve used our centrally located eyes for very different purposes: scanning bushes for ripe fruit at close range, and much more recently, for reading the facial expressions of others. Cats’ eye placement is a major part of what makes their faces appear so person-like to us. (Owls, another visual nocturnal predator, have similar facial composition, which perhaps explains why we prefer them to, say, vultures.)

He flapped and hopped until he was up in the air and, frantically looking around, eyed the dining room table again and headed its way. This time he stuck his feet out in front of him and held them open like hands trying to grab solid ground. But it didn’t help. He hit the table, slid on his rear all the way across, and crashed on the floor again. Again I dissolved in laughter and again Wesley stared stonily at the wall. I stopped laughing abruptly when I realized that Wesley was embarrassed. Learning to fly is physically and emotionally very difficult, and human owl mothers should not laugh at their babies. From then on I tried my hardest to keep a straight face. Most pet owners know that animals can read emotions such as anger, approval, affection, and acceptance. But it had never occurred to me that perhaps an animal could feel ridiculed. From that point forward, no one in Wendy’s house was allowed to laugh at Wesley, at least not in front of him, while he was learning to fly. Sometimes we had to run into the bathroom, shut the door, and burst out laughing.

Solitary Swedish Houses" A mix-max of black spruce and smoking moonbeams. Here’s the croft lying low and not a sign of life. Till the morning dew murmurs and an old man opens – with a shaky hand – his window and lets out an owl. Further off, the new building stands steaming with the laundry butterfly fluttering at the corner in the middle of a dying wood where the mouldering reads through spectacles of sap the proceedings of the bark-drillers. Summer with flaxen-haired rain or one solitary thunder-cloud above a barking dog. The seed is kicking inside the earth. Agitated voices, faces fly in the telephone wires on stunted rapid wings across the moorland miles. The house on an island in the river brooding on its stony foundations. Perpetual smoke – they’re burning the forest’s secret papers. The rain wheels in the sky. The light coils in the river. Houses on the slope supervise the waterfall’s white oxen. Autumn with a gang of starlings holding dawn in check. The people move stiffly in the lamplight’s theatre. Let them feel without alarm the camouflaged wings and God’s energy coiled up in the dark.

To Begin With, the Sweet Grass 1. Will the hungry ox stand in the field and not eat of the sweet grass? Will the owl bite off its own wings? Will the lark forget to lift its body in the air or forget to sing? Will the rivers run upstream? Behold, I say—behold the reliability and the finery and the teachings of this gritty earth gift. 2. Eat bread and understand comfort. Drink water, and understand delight. Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds who are drinking the sweetness, who are thrillingly gluttonous. For one thing leads to another. Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot. Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in. And someone's face, whom you love, will be as a star both intimate and ultimate, and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful. And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper: oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two beautiful bodies of your lungs. 3. The witchery of living is my whole conversation with you, my darlings. All I can tell you is what I know. Look, and look again. This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes. It's more than bones. It's more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse. It's more than the beating of the single heart. It's praising. It's giving until the giving feels like receiving. You have a life—just imagine that! You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe still another. 4. Someday I am going to ask my friend Paulus, the dancer, the potter, to make me a begging bowl which I believe my soul needs. And if I come to you, to the door of your comfortable house with unwashed clothes and unclean fingernails, will you put something into it? I would like to take this chance. I would like to give you this chance. 5. We do one thing or another; we stay the same, or we change. Congratulations, if you have changed. 6. Let me ask you this. Do you also think that beauty exists for some fabulous reason? And, if you have not been enchanted by this adventure— your life— what would do for you? 7. What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mostly myself. Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to. That was many years ago. Since then I have gone out from my confinements, though with difficulty. I mean the ones that thought to rule my heart. I cast them out, I put them on the mush pile. They will be nourishment somehow (everything is nourishment somehow or another). And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope. I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is. I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned, I have become younger. And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know? Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.

In my beginning is my end. In succession Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires, Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth Which is already flesh, fur and faeces, Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf. Houses live and die: there is a time for building And a time for living and for generation And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto. In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls Across the open field, leaving the deep lane Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon, Where you lean against a bank while a van passes, And the deep lane insists on the direction Into the village, in the electric heat Hypnotised. In a warm haze the sultry light Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone. The dahlias sleep in the empty silence. Wait for the early owl. In that open field If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close, On a summer midnight, you can hear the music Of the weak pipe and the little drum And see them dancing around the bonfire The association of man and woman In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie— A dignified and commodiois sacrament. Two and two, necessarye coniunction, Holding eche other by the hand or the arm Whiche betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles, Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes, Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth Mirth of those long since under earth Nourishing the corn. Keeping time, Keeping the rhythm in their dancing As in their living in the living seasons The time of the seasons and the constellations The time of milking and the time of harvest The time of the coupling of man and woman And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling. Eating and drinking. Dung and death. Dawn points, and another day Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind Wrinkles and slides. I am here Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.

I hurled myself into the study of my subject with renewed fervor, able to see the dry facts and arid descriptions in the same transforming magical light that had favored them when I was younger. A scientific understanding of the beautifully synchronized and articulated motion of an owl's individual feathers during flight does not impede a poetic appreciation for the same phenomenon. Rather, the two enhance each other, a more lyrical eye lending the cold data a romance from which it has long been divorced. Immersing myself avidly in dusty and long untouched reference books I came across forgotten passages that would make me almost breathless, dreary-looking tomes that would reveal themselves to be treasure houses of iridescent wonder.

But Aunt Petunia didn’t know what was hidden under the loose floorboard upstairs. She had no idea that Harry was not following the diet at all. The moment he had got wind of the fact that he was expected to survive the summer on carrot sticks, Harry had sent Hedwig to his friends with pleas for help, and they had risen to the occasion magnificently. Hedwig had returned from Hermione’s house with a large box stuffed full of sugar-free snacks. (Hermione’s parents were dentists.) Hagrid, the Hogwarts gamekeeper, had obliged with a sack full of his own homemade rock cakes. (Harry hadn’t touched these; he had had too much experience of Hagrid’s cooking.) Mrs. Weasley, however, had sent the family owl, Errol, with an enormous fruitcake and assorted meat pies.

Then, as he wended his way, by swamp and stream and awful woodland, to the farm-house where he happened to be quartered, every sound of nature, at that witching hour, fluttered his excited imagination : the moan of the whip-poor-will from the hill-side; the boding cry of the tree-toad, that har- binger of storm; the dreary hooting of the screech-owl, or the sudden rustling in the thicket of birds frightened from their roost. The fire-flies, too, which sparkled most vividly in the darkest places, now and then startled him, as one of uncommon brightness would stream across his path; and if, by chance, a huge blockhead of a beetle came winging his blundering flight against him, the poor varlet was ready to give up the ghost, with the idea that he was struck with a witch's token.

When my condition improved I made up my mind to go away, to go somewhere where people would never find me again, like a dog with distemper who knows that he is going to die or like the birds that hide themselves when the time to die has come. Early one morning I rose, dressed, took a couple of cakes that were lying on the top shelf and, without attracting anyone’s attention, fled from the house. I was running away from my own misery. I walked aimlessly along the streets, I wandered without set purpose among the rabble-men as they hurried by, an expression of greed on their faces, in pursuit of money and sexual satisfaction. I had no need to see them since any one of them was a sample of the lot. Each and every one of them consisted only of a mouth and a wad of guts hanging from it, the whole terminating in a set of genitals.

A month from now, in early April, at the time when far away, outside the city, the water hyacinths would be covering every inch of bayou, lagoon, creek, and backwater with a spiritual-mauve to obscene-purple, violent, vulgar, fleshy, solid, throttling mass of bloom over the black water, and the first heartbreaking, misty green, like girlhood dreams, on the old cypresses would have settled down to be leaf and not a damned thing else, and the arm-thick, mud-colored, slime-slick mocassins would heave out of the swamp and try to cross the highway and your front tire hitting one would give a slight bump and make a sound like kerwhush and a tinny thump when he slapped heavily up against the underside of the fender, and the insects would come boiling out of the swamps and day and night the whole air would vibrate with them with a sound like an electric fan, and if it was night the owls back in the swamps would be whoo-ing and moaning like love and death and damnation, or one would sail out of the pitch dark into the rays of your headlights and plunge against the radiator to explode like a ripped feather bolster, and the fields would be deep in that rank, hairy or slick, juicy, sticky grass which the cattle gorge on and never get flesh over their ribs for that grass is in that black soil and no matter how far the roots could ever go, if the roots were God knows how deep, there would never be anything but that black, grease-clotted soil and no stone down there to put calcium into that grass—well, a month from now, in early April, when all those things would be happening beyond the suburbs, the husks of the old houses in the street where Anne Stanton and I were walking would, if it were evening, crack and spill out onto the stoops and into the street all that life which was now sealed up within.

Dog Talk … I have seen Ben place his nose meticulously into the shallow dampness of a deer’s hoofprint and shut his eyes as if listening. But it is smell he is listening to. The wild, high music of smell, that we know so little about. Tonight Ben charges up the yard; Bear follows. They run into the field and are gone. A soft wind, like a belt of silk, wraps the house. I follow them to the end of the field where I hear the long-eared owl, at wood’s edge, in one of the tall pines. All night the owl will sit there inventing his catty racket, except when he opens pale wings and drifts moth-like over the grass. I have seen both dogs look up as the bird floats by, and I suppose the field mouse hears it too, in the pebble of his tiny heart. Though I hear nothing. Bear is small and white with a curly tail. He was meant to be idle and pretty but learned instead to love the world, and to romp roughly with the big dogs. The brotherliness of the two, Ben and Bear, increases with each year. They have their separate habits, their own favorite sleeping places, for example, yet each worries without letup if the other is missing. They both bark rapturously and in support of each other. They both sneeze to express plea- sure, and yawn in humorous admittance of embarrassment. In the car, when we are getting close to home and the smell of the ocean begins to surround them, they both sit bolt upright and hum. With what vigor and intention to please himself the little white dog flings himself into every puddle on the muddy road. Somethings are unchangeably wild, others are stolid tame. The tiger is wild, the coyote, and the owl. I am tame, you are tame. The wild things that have been altered, but only into a semblance of tameness, it is no real change. But the dog lives in both worlds. Ben is devoted, he hates the door between us, is afraid of separation. But he had, for a number of years, a dog friend to whom he was also loyal. Every day they and a few others gathered into a noisy gang, and some of their games were bloody. Dog is docile, and then forgets. Dog promises then forgets. Voices call him. Wolf faces appear in dreams. He finds himself running over incredible lush or barren stretches of land, nothing any of us has ever seen. Deep in the dream, his paws twitch, his lip lifts. The dreaming dog leaps through the underbrush, enters the earth through a narrow tunnel, and is home. The dog wakes and the disturbance in his eyes when you say his name is a recognizable cloud. How glad he is to see you, and he sneezes a little to tell you so. But ah! the falling-back, fading dream where he was almost there again, in the pure, rocky weather-ruled beginning. Where he was almost wild again, and knew nothing else but that life, no other possibility. A world of trees and dogs and the white moon, the nest, the breast, the heart-warming milk! The thick-mantled ferocity at the end of the tunnel, known as father, a warrior he himself would grow to be. …

I struck a match to find the keyhole, but my eyes, involuntarily, caught sight of the black-clad figure, and I recognized the two oblique eyes—two large, black eyes amid a silvery thin face—the same eyes that stared at a man's face without actually seeing. Even if I had not seen her before, I would have recognized her. No. I was not mistaken. This black-clad figure was she. Astounded and bewildered, I stood petrified in my place. I felt like someone who is dreaming, and who knows that he is asleep, but who cannot wake up when he wants to. The match, having burnt itself and my fingers, brought me to reality. I turned the key, opened the door, and drew myself aside. Like someone familiar with the way, she got off the platform and crossed the dark corridor. She opened the door of my room and entered. I followed her in. I lit the lamp quickly and saw that she had already retired to my bed and was lying on it. Her face was in the shade. I did not know whether she could see me or hear me. Her outward appearance showed no trace of either fear, or of a desire to resist me. It seemed as though she had involuntarily come to my house. Was she sick? Had she lost her way? She had come here like a sleepwalker, quite unconsciously. The mental state I experienced at this moment is beyond the imagination of any living being. I felt a kind of pleasant, yet indescribable, pain. No. I was not mistaken. That lady, and this girl, who unceremoniously and without uttering a word had entered my room were the same person. I had always imagined our first meeting to happen like this. For me, this state was like an endless, deep sleep; one has to be in a very deep sleep to have such a dream. The silence that weighed on me was like an eternal life. It is hard to speak at the beginning, or at the end of eternity.

In my house, our parents put us to bed with two simple words: “Shut up.” That was always the last thing we heard before our lights were turned off. Our artwork did not hang on the refrigerator or anywhere near it, because our parents recognized it for what it was: crap. They did not live in a child’s house, we lived in theirs.

I couldn't bear to think he housed such strange sorrow.

The Resonance of Honeyed Summer Elizabethan Sonnet Sequence abab, cdcd, efef, gg Synchronous in honeyed summer sings a choir of tremulous birch leaves, A sweet breeze surges south from the mountains to cool down the farm. To a white picket fence, among the honeybees, a steadfast garden cleaves, After blind disregard by a town plow, mended again from winter harm. A sensual scent of new mown meadow, the clash of croquet mallet to ball, A ricochet sings a tin din of two wickets and a knock into a winning stake. By the barn, night owls howl, by day gleeful wee hummingbirds enthrall. The mirth of dipping children as wakes of droning motorboats lap a lake. Bluebirds have woven a love nest in a stilted, rough-hewn, wooden house. By a stonewall wild berries grow swollen from green to a misty blue hue. As we ride bikes beside a hayfield, we rouse the flight of a russet grouse. At dawn a doe and fawn cross our lawn leaving hoof prints upon the dew. In long lemonade days, rocking and sipping on the porch, in our defense, We're in awe of honeyed summertime and the harmony of its resonance. + + +

Nonethless it had been a castle, with all that this implies: it had had towering walls and turrets, beams as great as trees, arched doorways wide enough for processions to pass through, ceilings so cavernous that owls nested in them. It had had wings and ramparts and thin windows from which to shoot arrows, internal courtyards, banquet rooms, hidden doors, secret passages. It had had a chapel and, in its bowels, a dungeon. It housed sculptures and paintings, tapestries and cushions, carpets and carvings, its fortressed heart had been clad in glit, silver, glass, gold, damask, ivory, ermine.

The dead cannot sleep long when the moon is round The dead toss and turn deep in the muddy ground The dead never rest well in the living house The dead hear the secrets the owl tells the mouse

My initial solution came in the form of night rovings, like an owl or a coyote. I had been stagnating in the house too long, and some glowing ball of spirit in me threatened to fade to nothing, and I feared it might be like fire—you need fire to make fire, and you must never let the last of it die.

Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.

Fleur’s words were drowned in a scream. Hermione was pointing through the kitchen window. Three black specks were clearly visible in the sky, growing larger all the time. ‘They’re definitely owls,’ said Ron hoarsely, jumping up to join Hermione at the window. ‘And there are three of them,’ said Harry, hastening to her other side. ‘One for each of us,’ said Hermione in a terrified whisper. ‘Oh no … oh no … oh no …’ She gripped both Harry and Ron tightly around the elbows. The owls were flying directly at The Burrow, three handsome tawnies, each of which, it became clear as they flew lower over the path leading up to the house, was carrying a large square envelope. ‘Oh no!’ squealed Hermione. Mrs Weasley squeezed past them and opened the kitchen window. One, two, three, the owls soared through it and landed on the table in a neat line. All three of them lifted their right legs.

All Harry’s spellbooks, his wand, robes, cauldron and top-of-the-range Nimbus Two Thousand broomstick had been locked in a cupboard under the stairs by Uncle Vernon the instant Harry had come home. What did the Dursleys care if Harry lost his place in the house Quidditch team because he hadn’t practised all summer? What was it to the Dursleys if Harry went back to school without any of his homework done? The Dursleys were what wizards called Muggles (not a drop of magical blood in their veins) and as far as they were concerned, having a wizard in the family was a matter of deepest shame. Uncle Vernon had even padlocked Harry’s owl, Hedwig, inside her cage, to stop her carrying messages to anyone in the wizarding world.

There were no rules any more. And in the Age of Anything-Can-Happen, well, anything could happen. Old friends could become new enemies and traditional enemies could be your new besties or even lovers. It was no longer possible to predict the weather, or the likelihood of war, or the outcome of elections. A woman might fall in love with a piglet, or a man start living with an owl. A beauty might fall asleep and, when kissed, wake up speaking a different language and in that new language reveal a completely altered character. A flood might drown your city. A tornado might carry your house to a faraway land where, upon landing, it would squash a witch. Criminals could become kings and kings be unmasked as criminals. A man might discover that the woman he lived with was his father’s illegitimate child. A whole nation might jump off a cliff like swarming lemmings. Men who played presidents on TV could become presidents. The water might run out. A woman might bear a baby who was found to be a revenant god. Words could lose their meanings and acquire new ones. The world might end, as at least one prominent scientist-entrepreneur had begun repeatedly to predict. An evil scent would hang over the ending. And a TV star might miraculously return the love of a foolish old coot, giving him an unlikely romantic triumph which would redeem a long, small life, bestowing upon it, at the last, the radiance of majesty.

Nearly ten years had passed since the Dursleys had woken up to find their nephew on the front step, but Privet Drive had hardly changed at all. The sun rose on the same tidy front gardens and lit up the brass number four on the Dursleys’ front door; it crept into their living-room, which was almost exactly the same as it had been on the night when Mr Dursley had seen that fateful news report about the owls. Only the photographs on the mantelpiece really showed how much time had passed. Ten years ago, there had been lots of pictures of what looked like a large pink beach ball wearing different-coloured bobble hats – but Dudley Dursley was no longer a baby, and now the photographs showed a large, blond boy riding his first bicycle, on a roundabout at the fair, playing a computer game with his father, being hugged and kissed by his mother. The room held no sign at all that another boy lived in the house, too.

SOME QUESTIONS YOU MIGHT ASK Is the soul solid, like iron? Or is it tender and breakable, like the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl? Who has it, and who doesn’t? I keep looking around me. The face of the moose is as sad as the face of Jesus. The swan opens her white wings slowly. In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness. One question leads to another. Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg? Like the eye of a hummingbird? Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop? Why should I have it, and not the anteater who loves her children? Why should I have it, and not the camel?

I thought about Hannah in her bed. Hannah stretched out on her back, sleeping in a cami and thong, her beautiful br**sts heaving slowly and her legs crooked apart. Or Hannah on her stomach, her heart-shaped rump in the air. I could climb over her, wake her with a kiss. Brush my body along hers. I felt a throb between my legs. I glared down at my cock. "Hold your f**king horses," I muttered. God, fuck... was this seriously my life? Stalking a girl I'd met online, parked outside her house at midnight, speaking to my dick?

I don’t know how these couples do it, spend hours each night tucking their kids in, reading them books about misguided kittens or seals who wear uniforms, and then rereading them if the child so orders. In my house, our parents put us to bed with two simple words: “Shut up.

Kyle stood behind Chaz with his mouth hanging open and his eyes doing a rapid blinking thing that reminded me of an owl. “So what if I want to take in every stray cat I find so that I can look at him and smell his body wash. You think I’m the only one? Please,” he said exaggeratingly. “If that man knew how many people fantasized about his hunky body then he’d never leave his house.” Meredith

At dusk, on the last day of April, I hear a calling noise, like a white-winged barn owl, and I go to my window and push open the shutters and look out. There is a waning moon rising off the horizon, white against a white sky; it too is wasting away, and in its cold light I can hear a calling, like a choir, and I know it is not the music of owls, nor singers nor nightingales, but Melusina. Our ancestor goddess is calling around the roof of the house, for her daughter Jacquetta of the House of Burgundy is dying.

The Bohemian Grove has held secret meetings for the global elite since 1873 in a redwood forest of northern California. In addition to Republican presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush, members have included James Baker, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, David Rockefeller, William Casey, and Henry Kissinger. Each year, the members don red, black, and silver robes and conduct a ritual in which they worship a giant stone owl.

That’s the trouble round here,’ snapped Larry. ‘Nobody counts! And before you know where you are you’re knee deep in animals. It’s like the bloody creation all over again, only worse. One owl turns into a battalion before you know where you are; sex-mad pigeons defying Marie Stopes in every room of the house; the place is so full of birds it’s like a bloody poulterer’s shop, to say nothing of snakes and toads and enough small fry to keep Macbeth’s witches in provender for years. And on top of all that you go and get twelve more dogs. It’s a perfect example of the streak of lunacy that runs in this family.’ ‘Nonsense, Larry, you do exaggerate,’ said Mother. ‘Such a lot of fuss over a few puppies.’ ‘You call eleven puppies a few? The place will look like the Greek branch of Crufts’ Dog Show and they’ll probably all turn out to be bitches and come into season simultaneously. Life will deteriorate into one long canine sexual orgy.

A sparrow will endure incessant questioning when he lives in an owlery.

A butterfly entering the house through a window. Spotting an owl in the daylight. The thin glow of a halo that sometimes circled the moon in winter.

Critics of the administration recently pointed out that over 180,000 families will be displaced in Metro Manila should the NLEX-SLEX Connector Road Project and the North-South Commuter Railway (NSCR) Project push through. This claim is fictitious, inaccurate, and misleading. For example, based on the census and tagging conducted by the National Housing Authority, the government agency mandated to relocate and resettle Informal Settler Families (ISFs) affected by the construction of national infrastructure projects, the estimated number of likely affected ISFs in the NLEX – SLEX Connector Road Project is only 1,700.

In the morning he would forget all of it—but the night was not yet over. And somewhere in the darkest, iciest low part of it, when even owls and loons were prompted to noiselessness out of either fear or respect, he slipped deeper into sleep, as deep into it as a man could go without losing all chance of coming back. Still, even in the pit of it, he could hear and identify the sound. The rocker, creaking.

Far away, a huge owl banked, circled a large, rambling house built into the cliffs, and approached it warily. As the bird landed on a stone gate column, folded its wings, and shimmered into human shape, the wolf pack in the surrounding woods began to sing in warning. Almost at once a man emerged from the house. Lazily he glided from the fog-shrouded verandah across the grounds to the gates. He was tall, dark-haired. Power emanated from his every pore. He moved with the grace of a great jungle cat, the elegance of a prince. His eyes were as black as the night and held a thousand secrets. Although there was no expression on his handsome, sensual features, there was danger, a quiet menace in the way he held himself. “Byron. It is long since you have visited us. You did not send a call ahead.” No censure roughened the soft, musical, black-velvet voice, yet it was there in volumes. Byron cleared his throat, agitated, his dark eyes not quite meeting the other’s penetrating gaze. “I am sorry, Mikhail, for my bad manners, but the news I bring is unsettling. I came as fast as I could and still cannot find the right words to tell you this.” Mikhail Dubrinsky waved a graceful hand. One of the ancients, one of the most powerful, he had long ago learned patience. “I was late going to ground this dawn. I had not fed, so I went to the village and summoned one of the locals to me. When I entered the area, I sensed the presence of one of our kind, a woman. She did not look as we do; she is small, very slender, with dark red hair and green eyes. I could tell she was weak, had not recently fed. Using our common mental path, I tried to communicate with her, but she did not respond.” “You are certain she is one of us? It does not seem possible, Byron. Our women are so few, one would not be wandering unprotected, uncared for, at dawn, unknown to us.” “She is Carpathian, Mikhail, and she is unclaimed.” “And you did not stay with her, guard her, bring her to me?” The voice had dropped another octave, so soft it whispered with menace. “There is more. There were bruises on her throat, ragged wounds, several of them. Her arms, too, were bruised. This woman has been ill-used, Mikhail.” A red flame glowed in the depths of the black eyes. “Tell me what you are so reluctant to reveal.” The black velvet voice never hardened or increased in volume. Byron stood silent for a long moment, then steadily met the direct, penetrating stare. “Jacques’ blood runs in her veins. I would know his scent anywhere.” Mikhail did not blink, his body utterly still. “Jacques is dead.” Byron shook his head. “I am not mistaken. It is Jacques.

Foreign leaves feed many a marsupial, grub and duck. Koalas often munch on American cypress pine needles and camphor laurel leaves. (They also like to perch in camphor laurels in summer for the cool shade they throw.) Exotic foods, and I don’t just mean weeds, are thoroughly enmeshed in foodwebs. Most Australia’s birds of prey take exotic meats. A study around Mildura found that young rabbits were the staple food (60-92 percent by weight) of eagles, goshawks, harriers, kites and falcons – eight species in all. That was be calicivirus struck. Wedge-tailed eagles will eat feral cats. In Western Australia little eagles moved into the south-west when rabbits arrived, then retreated after myxomatosis struck. House mice feed hawks, snakes and owls in central Australia, making up to 97 percent of barn owl diets.

If grown-ups were sensible, they would allow a child to follow its own instinct. Nature must surely know better than mothers; and my nature tells me to sit up at nights and have breakfast in bed.

A few nights ago when I took off my clothes in a cubicle at the bath-house my thoughts took a new direction. As the attendant poured water over my head I felt as though my black thoughts were being washed away. I observed my shadow on the steamy wall of the bath-house. I saw that I was as frail and thin as I had been ten years earlier, when I was a child. I remembered distinctly that my shadow had fallen then in just the same way on the wet wall of the bathhouse. I looked down at my body. There was something lascivious and yet hopeless in the look of my thighs, calves and loins. Their shadow too had not changed since ten years before, when I was only a child. I felt that my whole life had passed without purpose or meaning like the flickering shadows on the bath-house wall. Other people were massive, solid, thick-necked. Doubtless the shadows they cast on the steamy wall of the bathhouse were bigger and denser and left their imprint for some moments after they had gone, whereas mine was effaced instantaneously. When I had finished dressing after the bath my gestures and thoughts seemed to change again. It was as though I had entered a different world, as though I had been born again in the old world that I detested. At all events I could say that I had acquired a new life, for it seemed a miracle to me that I had not dissolved in the bath like a lump of salt.

The woods noises seemed to engulf her. Her ears were filled with owl calls, the mutter of settling birds, and the scraping noise of dead tree branches rubbing together. The longer she stood, the more she became convinced she could hear weedy, whispering voices among the trees.

Some Choose Darkness—was like a homeowner hanging a plastic owl on the side of their house to scare off woodpeckers.

You can't hide forever, Bruce! That's what Waynes always try to do, but it's no use. So go on, little Bruce, and... Open up? Get the hell out of my house.

Get the hell out of my house.

Every day I, Marilyn, lie on the sofa in our living room and look out through the floor-to- ceiling windows at the oaks and evergreens that live on our property. It is now springtime, and I have watched green leaves reappear on our magnificent valley oak. Earlier today I saw an owl perch on the spruce between the front of our house and Irv’s office. I can see a bit of the vegetable garden that our son Reid planted with tomatoes, green beans, cucumbers, and squash. He wants me to think about vegetables ripening in the summer, when I will presumably “be better.

When the folks first left, and the evening of the first day came, the hunting cats slouched in from the fields and mewed on the porch. And when no one came out, the cats crept through the open doors and walked mewing through the empty rooms. And then they went back to the fields and were wild cats from then on, hunting gophers and field mice, and sleeping in ditches in the daytime. When the night came, the bats, which had stopped at the doors for fear of light, swooped into the houses and sailed about through the empty rooms, and in a little while they stayed in dark room corners during the day, folded their wings high, and hung head-down among the rafters, and the smell of their droppings was in the empty houses. And the mice moved in and stored weed seeds in corners, in boxes in the backs of drawers in the kitchens. And weasels came in the hunt the mice, and the brown owls flew shrieking in and out again. Now there came a little shower. The weeds sprang up in front of the doorstep, where they had not been allowed, and grass grew up through the porch boards. The houses were vacant, and a vacant house falls quickly apart. Splits started up the sheathing from the rusted nails. A dust settled on the floors, and only mouse and weasel and cat tracks disturbed it. On a night the wind loosened a shingle and flipped it to the ground. The next wind pried into the whole where the shingle had been, lifted off three, and the next, a dozen. The midday sun burned through the hole and threw a glaring spot on the floor. The wild cats crept in from the fields at night, but they did not mew at the doorstep any more. They moved like shadows of a cloud across the moon, into the rooms to hunt the mice. And on windy nights the doors banged, and the ragged curtains fluttered in the broken windows.

that strange and mysterious things would soon be happening all over the country. Mr Dursley hummed as he picked out his most boring tie for work and Mrs Dursley gossiped away happily as she wrestled a screaming Dudley into his high chair. None of them noticed a large tawny owl flutter past the window. At half past eight, Mr Dursley picked up his briefcase, pecked Mrs Dursley on the cheek and tried to kiss Dudley goodbye but missed, because Dudley was now having a tantrum and throwing his cereal at the walls. ‘Little tyke,’ chortled Mr Dursley as he left the house. He got into his car and backed out of number four’s drive. It was on the corner of the street that he noticed the first sign of something peculiar – a cat reading a map. For a second, Mr Dursley didn’t realise what he had seen – then he jerked his head around to look again. There was a tabby cat standing on the corner of Privet Drive, but there wasn’t a map in sight. What could he have been thinking of? It must have been a trick of the light. Mr Dursley blinked and stared at the cat. It stared back. As Mr Dursley drove around the corner and up the road, he watched the cat in his mirror. It was now reading the sign that said Privet Drive – no, looking at the sign; cats couldn’t read maps or signs. Mr Dursley gave himself a little shake and put the cat out of his mind. As he drove towards town he thought of nothing except a large order of drills he was hoping to get that day. But on the edge of town, drills were driven out of his mind by something else. As he sat in the usual morning traffic jam, he couldn’t help noticing that there seemed to be a lot of strangely dressed people about. People in cloaks. Mr Dursley couldn’t bear people who dressed in funny clothes – the get-ups you saw on young people! He supposed this was some stupid new fashion. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and his eyes fell on a huddle of these weirdos standing quite close by. They were whispering excitedly together. Mr Dursley was enraged to see that a couple of them weren’t young at all; why, that man had to be older than he was, and wearing an emerald-green cloak! The nerve of him! But

Reginald’s furnishings, I noted, were solid oak. Oak! Now there was a wood you could trust. I noticed something odd about his bookcase—something that caused a small but sharp bell of warning to ring in my mind. Most of the volumes on its shelves were quite old, and bound in rotting human skin. Finally I noticed the thing that had set off my inner alarm: the bookends were mismatched. One was a human skull and the other was a kitschy little plastic owl. Certainly plastic has no place in the decor of a gentleman’s study.

Little blue house. Lost blue boy.

Sola went back over to the drapes that he wouldn’t let her open. Jesus, it was like living with a bunch of vampires in this house, everything buttoned up during the daylight hours. Then again, that was the way of drug dealers. Night owls, the lot of them.

Fundamentals of Esperanto The grammatical rules of this language can be learned in one sitting. Nouns have no gender & end in -o; the plural terminates in -oj & the accusative, -on Amiko, friend; amikoj, friends; amikon & amikojn, accusative friend & friends. Ma amiko is my friend. A new book appears in Esperanto every week. Radio stations in Europe, the United States, China, Russia & Brazil broadcast in Esperanto, as does Vatican Radio. In 1959, UNESCO declared the International Federation of Esperanto Speakers to be in accord with its mission & granted this body consultative status. The youth branch of the International Federation of Esperanto Speakers, UTA, has offices in 80 different countries & organizes social events where young people curious about the movement may dance to recordings by Esperanto artists, enjoy complimentary soft drinks & take home Esperanto versions of major literary works including the Old Testament & A Midsummer Night’s Dream. William Shatner’s first feature-length vehicle was a horror film shot entirely in Esperanto. Esperanto is among the languages currently sailing into deep space on board the Voyager spacecraft. - Esperanto is an artificial language constructed in 1887 by L. L. Zamenhof, a polish oculist. following a somewhat difficult period in my life. It was twilight & snowing on the railway platform just outside Warsaw where I had missed my connection. A man in a crumpled track suit & dark glasses pushed a cart piled high with ripped & weathered volumes— sex manuals, detective stories, yellowing musical scores & outdated physics textbooks, old copies of Life, new smut, an atlas translated, a grammar, The Mirror, Soviet-bloc comics, a guide to the rivers & mountains, thesauri, inscrutable musical scores & mimeographed physics books, defective stories, obsolete sex manuals— one of which caught my notice (Dr. Esperanto since I had time, I traded my used Leaves of Grass for a copy. I’m afraid I will never be lonely enough. There’s a man from Quebec in my head, a friend to the purple martins. Purple martins are the Cadillac of swallows. All purple martins are dying or dead. Brainscans of grown purple martins suggest these creatures feel the same levels of doubt & bliss as an eight-year-old girl in captivity. While driving home from the brewery one night this man from Quebec heard a radio program about purple martins & the next day he set out to build them a house in his own back yard. I’ve never built anything, let alone a house, not to mention a home for somebody else. Never put in aluminum floors to smooth over the waiting. Never piped sugar water through colored tubes to each empty nest lined with newspaper shredded with strong, tired hands. Never dismantled the entire affair & put it back together again. Still no swallows. I never installed the big light that stays on through the night to keep owls away. Never installed lesser lights, never rested on Sunday with a beer on the deck surveying what I had done & what yet remained to be done, listening to Styx while the neighbor kids ran through my sprinklers. I have never collapsed in abandon. Never prayed. But enough about the purple martins. Every line of the work is a first & a last line & this is the spring of its action. Of course, there’s a journey & inside that journey, an implicit voyage through the underworld. There’s a bridge made of boats; a carp stuffed with flowers; a comic dispute among sweetmeat vendors; a digression on shadows; That’s how we finally learn who the hero was all along. Weary & old, he sits on a rock & watches his friends fly by one by one out of the song, then turns back to the journey they all began long ago, keeping the river to his right.

Potters. Mrs. Potter was Mrs. Dursley’s sister, but they hadn’t met for several years; in fact, Mrs. Dursley pretended she didn’t have a sister, because her sister and her good-for-nothing husband were as unDursleyish as it was possible to be. The Dursleys shuddered to think what the neighbors would say if the Potters arrived in the street. The Dursleys knew that the Potters had a small son, too, but they had never even seen him. This boy was another good reason for keeping the Potters away; they didn’t want Dudley mixing with a child like that. When Mr. and Mrs. Dursley woke up on the dull, gray Tuesday our story starts, there was nothing about the cloudy sky outside to suggest that strange and mysterious things would soon be happening all over the country. Mr. Dursley hummed as he picked out his most boring tie for work, and Mrs. Dursley gossiped away happily as she wrestled a screaming Dudley into his high chair. None of them noticed a large, tawny owl flutter past the window. At half past eight, Mr. Dursley picked up his briefcase, pecked Mrs. Dursley on the cheek, and tried to kiss Dudley good-bye but missed, because Dudley was now having a tantrum and throwing his cereal at the walls. “Little tyke,” chortled Mr. Dursley as he left the house. He got into his car and backed out of number four’s drive. It was on the corner of the street that he noticed the first sign of something peculiar — a cat reading a map. For a second, Mr. Dursley didn’t realize what he had seen — then he jerked his head around to look again. There was a tabby cat standing on the corner of Privet Drive, but there wasn’t a map in sight. What could he have been

Merridale Lane is one of those corners of Surrey where the inhabitants wage a relentless battle against the stigma of suburbia. Trees, fertilized and cajoled into being in every front garden, half obscure the poky ‘Character dwellings’ which crouch behind them. The rusticity of the environment is enhanced by the wooden owls that keep guard over the names of houses, and by crumbling dwarfs indefatigably poised over goldfish ponds. The inhabitants of Merridale Lane do not paint their dwarfs, suspecting this to be a suburban vice, nor, for the same reason, do they varnish the owls; but wait patiently for the years to endow these treasures with an appearance of weathered antiquity, until one day even the beams on the garage may boast of beetle and woodworm.

All that day Greta and I were excited by the thought of the animals being housed in a tree. “After all, that’s the right place for them,” Greta said. “Squirrels and raccoons and owls are supposed to live in trees.” “I just hope that the law enforcement agent, or whoever comes, doesn’t happen to look up,” I said. “We’ll have to distract him so he won’t,” Greta said. “If he starts toward the tree, you pretend to faint.” “What if our animals make noises, like squeals or squeaks or chitterings?” “Then we’ll start talking really loud and drown them out.

Somewhere in the universe, in the gallery of important things, the babyish owl, ruffled and rakish, sits on its pedestal. Dear, dark dapple of plush! A message, reads the label, from that mysterious conglomerate: Oblivion and Co. The hooked head stares from its blouse of dark, feathery lace. It could be a valentine.

Hear my prayer O Lord and let my cry come unto thee. Hide not thy face from me in the day when I am in trouble; incline thine ear unto me; in the day when I call answer me speedily. For my days are consumed like smoke and my bones are burned as an hearth. My heart is smitten and withered like grass, so that I forget to eat my bread... I am like a pelican of the wilderness; I am like an owl of the desert. I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top.

Cocking a brow, she rose. “What’s all this about?” she asked the House, following the trail it had left. Down the hall, along the stairs, all the way down to the library itself. “Where are we going?” Nesta asked the warm air. Mercifully, even the night owls amongst the priestesses had gone to sleep, leaving no one to see her hurrying after the trail of branches. Around the levels of the library they twined, deeper and deeper, until they reached the seventh level. Nesta drew up short as the trail stopped at the edge of the wall of darkness. A light flickered beyond it. Several lights. As if to say, Come. Don’t be afraid. So Nesta sucked in a breath as she stepped into the gloom. Little tea lights wended into a familiar darkness. She and Feyre had once ventured down here—had faced horrors here. No evidence remained of that day. Only the firelit dimness, the candles leading her to the lowest levels of the library. To the pit itself. Nesta followed them, spiraling to the bottom of the pit, where one small lantern glowed, faintly illuminating the rows of books veiled in permanent shadow around it. Heart racing, Nesta lifted the lantern in one hand and gazed at the darkness, untouched by the light from the library high, high above. The heart of the world, of existence. Of self. The heart of the House. “This …” Her fingers tightened on the lantern. “This darkness is your heart.” As if in answer, the House laid a little evergreen sprig at her feet. “A Winter Solstice present. For me.” She could have sworn a warm hand brushed her neck in answer. “But your darkness …” Wonder softened her voice. “You were trying to show me. Show others. Who you are, down deep. What haunts you. You were trying to show them all those dark, broken pieces because the priestesses, and Emerie, and I … We’re the same as you.” Her throat constricted at what the House had gifted her. This knowledge. She lifted the lantern higher and blew out its flame. Let the darkness sweep in. Embraced it. “I’m not afraid,” she whispered into it. “You are my friend, and my home. Thank you for sharing this with me.” Again, Nesta could have sworn that phantom touch caressed her neck, her cheek, her brow. “Happy Solstice,” she said into the beautiful, fractured darkness.