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A monster owl out on the fence flew away. What is it the sign of? The sign of an owl.

This is a world where there are monsters There are monsters everywhere, racoons and skunks There are possums outside, there are monsters in my bed. There is one monster. He is my little one. I talk to my little monster. I give my little monster some bacon but that does not satisfy him. I tell him, ssh ssh, don’t growl little monster! And he growls, oh boy does he growl! And he wants something from me, He wants my soul. And finally giving in, I give him my gleaming soul And as he eats my gleaming soul, I am one with him And stare out his eyepits and I see nothing but white And then I see nothing but fog and the white I had seen before was nothing but fog And there is nothing but fog out the eyes of monsters.

The monsters in my closet Like to sleep the day away. So when I get home from school, I let them out to play. When Mom calls me for supper, I give them each a broom. First they put my toys away, And then they clean my room. The Mummy hates to vacuum. So if he starts to whine, I kick his rear and tell him, “Trade jobs with Frankenstein.” Wolfman used to fold my clothes. I’ll give him one more chance— Last time he wasn’t careful And left furballs in my pants. When my room is nice and neat, I bring them up some food. But Dracula wants to drink my blood— I think that’s pretty rude. When it’s time to go to bed, I hug them all goodnight. They jump back in my closet, While I turn out the light. I’ve taken care of monsters For as long as I recall, But the monsters in my closet Are the nicest ones of all!

As a boy he had trouble speaking, past three before a real word preened from his lips. And for the longest time, malaprops haunted him. His older sister did what she could to train the bitten seal of   his brain to twirl the red ball on the nose of eloquence, and his grandmother tired of   insisting he utter the names of   toys or foods — for every desire was coded — and gave him whatever he grunted and pointed to. O, the man then a boy thought, when I tower among them I should invent my own speech and leave others empty and afraid that they did not know it, could not ask or plead their case in the one tongue that mattered. I shall have them look upon the simplest things, the man then a boy thought, and fill up with stolen awe, and point with their faces, their pupils wide as blackened coins, and hope with all the revenue shattered heart-glass can muster that someone had grasped their need as need and not as the monstrous coupling of   sounds in a trance of whims. Then, the grind of   his teeth vowed, then the plazas of my city will fill with my name, and their blood will matter as little to them as to me.

I The everlasting universe of things Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves, Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom— Now lending splendour, where from secret springs The source of human thought its tribute brings Of waters—with a sound but half its own, Such as a feeble brook will oft assume, In the wild woods, among the mountains lone, Where waterfalls around it leap for ever, Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves. II Thus thou, Ravine of Arve—dark, deep Ravine— Thou many-colour'd, many-voiced vale, Over whose pines, and crags, and caverns sail Fast cloud-shadows and sunbeams: awful scene, Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down From the ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne, Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame Of lightning through the tempest;—thou dost lie, Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging, Children of elder time, in whose devotion The chainless winds still come and ever came To drink their odours, and their mighty swinging To hear—an old and solemn harmony; Thine earthly rainbows stretch'd across the sweep Of the aethereal waterfall, whose veil Robes some unsculptur'd image; the strange sleep Which when the voices of the desert fail Wraps all in its own deep eternity; Thy caverns echoing to the Arve's commotion, A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame; Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion, Thou art the path of that unresting sound— Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee I seem as in a trance sublime and strange To muse on my own separate fantasy, My own, my human mind, which passively Now renders and receives fast influencings, Holding an unremitting interchange With the clear universe of things around; One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings Now float above thy darkness, and now rest Where that or thou art no unbidden guest, In the still cave of the witch Poesy, Seeking among the shadows that pass by Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee, Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast From which they fled recalls them, thou art there! III Some say that gleams of a remoter world Visit the soul in sleep, that death is slumber, And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber Of those who wake and live.—I look on high; Has some unknown omnipotence unfurl'd The veil of life and death? or do I lie In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep Spread far around and inaccessibly Its circles? For the very spirit fails, Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep That vanishes among the viewless gales! Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky, Mont Blanc appears—still, snowy, and serene; Its subject mountains their unearthly forms Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps, Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread And wind among the accumulated steeps; A desert peopled by the storms alone, Save when the eagle brings some hunter's bone, And the wolf tracks her there—how hideously Its shapes are heap'd around! rude, bare, and high, Ghastly, and scarr'd, and riven.—Is this the scene Where the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea Of fire envelop once this silent snow? None can reply—all seems eternal now. The wilderness has a mysterious tongue Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild, So solemn, so serene, that man may be, But for such faith, with Nature reconcil'd; Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood By all, but which the wise, and great, and good Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel. IV The fields, the lakes, the forests, and the streams, Ocean, and all the living things that dwell Within the daedal earth; lightning, and rain, Earthquake, and fiery flood, and hurricane, The torpor of the year when feeble dreams Visit the hidden buds, or dreamless sleep Holds every future leaf and flower; the bound With which from that detested trance they leap; The works and ways of man, their death and birth, And that of him and all that his may be; All things that move and breathe with toil and sound Are born and die; revolve, subside, and swell. Power dwells apart in its tranquillity, Remote, serene, and inaccessible: And this, the naked countenance of earth, On which I gaze, even these primeval mountains Teach the adverting mind. The glaciers creep Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains, Slow rolling on; there, many a precipice Frost and the Sun in scorn of mortal power Have pil'd: dome, pyramid, and pinnacle, A city of death, distinct with many a tower And wall impregnable of beaming ice. Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing Its destin'd path, or in the mangled soil Branchless and shatter'd stand; the rocks, drawn down From yon remotest waste, have overthrown The limits of the dead and living world, Never to be reclaim'd. The dwelling-place Of insects, beasts, and birds, becomes its spoil; Their food and their retreat for ever gone, So much of life and joy is lost. The race Of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling Vanish, like smoke before the tempest's stream, And their place is not known. Below, vast caves Shine in the rushing torrents' restless gleam, Which from those secret chasms in tumult welling Meet in the vale, and one majestic River, The breath and blood of distant lands, for ever Rolls its loud waters to the ocean-waves, Breathes its swift vapours to the circling air. V Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:—the power is there, The still and solemn power of many sights, And many sounds, and much of life and death. In the calm darkness of the moonless nights, In the lone glare of day, the snows descend Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there, Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun, Or the star-beams dart through them. Winds contend Silently there, and heap the snow with breath Rapid and strong, but silently! Its home The voiceless lightning in these solitudes Keeps innocently, and like vapour broods Over the snow. The secret Strength of things Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee! And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea, If to the human mind's imaginings Silence and solitude were vacancy?

None of the streets here has a name, but if I’m lost tonight I’m happy to be lost. Ten million lanterns light the Seoul avenues for Buddha’s Birthday, ten million red blue green silver gold moons burning far as the eye can see in every direction & beyond, “one for every spirit,” voltage sizzling socket to socket as thought does, firing & firing the soul. Lashed by wind, flying up like helium balloons or hanging still depending on weather, they turn each road into an earthly River of Heaven doubling & reversing the river above, though not made of much: some colored paper, glue, a few wires, a constellation of poor facts. I can't help feeling giddy. I'm drunk on neon, drunk on air, drunk on seeing what was made almost from nothing: if anything's here at all it was built out of ash, out of the skull-rubble of war, the city rising brick by brick like a shared dream, every bridge & pylon & girder & spar a miracle, when half a century ago there was nothing but shrapnel, broken mortar-casings, corpses, the War Memorial in Itaewon counting More than 3 Million Dead, or Missing— still missed by the living, still loved beyond reason, monument to the fact that no one can hurt you, no one kill you like your own people. I’ll never understand it. I wonder about others I see on the sidewalks, each soul fathomless— strikers & scabs walking through Kwanghwamoon, or “Gate of Transformation by Light,” riot police rapping nightsticks against plexiglass-shields, hawkers haggling over cell phones or silk shirts, shaking dirt from chamae& bok choi, chanting price after price, fishermen cleaning tubs of cuttlefish & squid, stripping copper carp, lifting eels or green turtles dripping from tanks, Hanyak peddlars calling out names of cures for sickness or love— crushed bees, snake bile, ground deer antler, chrysanthemum root, bus drivers hurtling past in a blast of diesel-fumes, lovers so tender with each other I hold my breath, dispatchers shouting the names of stations, the grocer who calls me “daughter” because I look like her, for she has long since left home, vendors setting up pojangmachas to cook charred silkworms, broiled sparrows, frying sesame-leaves & mung-bean pancakes, men with hair the color of scallion root playing paduk, or GO, old enough to have stolen overcoats & shoes from corpses, whose spirits could not be broken, whose every breath seems to say: after things turned to their worst, we began again, but may you never go through what we went through, may you never see what we saw, may you never remember & may you never forget.

Now that the ticket to eternity has your name on it, we are here to pay the awkward tribute post-modernity allows to those who think they think your way but hear you only faintly, filtered through a gauze of echoes, sounding in a voice that could be counterfeit; and yet the noise seems to expand our notion of the true. An ivory forehead, landscape drunk on light, mother-of-pearl that flashes in the night: intimations of the miracle when the null steps forward as the all— these were signals, sparks that spattered from the anvil of illusions where you learned the music of a generation burned by an old myth: the end that will not come. There is no other myth. This sun-drenched yard proves it, freighted with the waiting dead, where votive plastic hyacinths relay the promise of one more technicolor day —the promise that is vouchsafed to you, scribe, and your dictator, while your names get blurred with all the others, like your hardest word dissolving in the language of the tribe.

I am no shepherd of a child’s surmises. I have seen fear where the coiled serpent rises, Thirst where the grasses burn in early May And thistle, mustard, and the wild oat stay. There is dust in this air. I saw in the heat Grasshoppers busy in the threshing wheat. So to this hour. Through the warm dusk I drove To blizzards sifting on the hissing stove, And found no images of pastoral will, But fear, thirst, hunger, and this huddled chill.

As our daughter approaches graduation and puberty at the same time, at her own, calm, deliberate, serious rate, she begins to kick up her heels, jazz out her hands, thrust out her hipbones, chant I’m great! I’m great! She feels 8th grade coming open around her, a chrysalis cracking and letting her out, it falls behind her and joins the other husks on the ground, 7th grade, 6th grade, the magenta rind of 5th grade, the hard jacket of 4th when she had so much pain, 3rd grade, 2nd, the dim cocoon of 1st grade back there somewhere on the path, and kindergarten like a strip of thumb-suck blanket taken from the actual blanket they wrapped her in at birth. The whole school is coming off her shoulders like a cloak unclasped, and she dances forth in her jerky sexy child’s joke dance of self, self, her throat tight and a hard new song coming out of it, while her two dark eyes shine above her body like a good mother and a good father who look down and love everything their baby does, the way she lives their love.

January Contorted by wind, mere armatures for ice or snow, the trees resolve to endure for now, they will leaf out in April. And I must be as patient as the trees— a winter resolution I break all over again, as the cold presses its sharp blade against my throat. February After endless hibernation on the windowsill, the orchid blooms— embroidered purple stitches up and down a slender stem. Outside, snow melts midair to rain. Abbreviated month. Every kind of weather. March When the Earl King came to steal away the child in Goethe’s poem, the father said don’t be afraid, it’s just the wind. . . As if it weren’t the wind that blows away the tender fragments of this world— leftover leaves in the corners of the garden, a Lenten Rose that thought it safe to bloom so early. April In the pastel blur of the garden, the cherry and redbud shake rain from their delicate shoulders, as petals of pink dogwood wash down the ditches in dreamlike rivers of color. May May apple, daffodil, hyacinth, lily, and by the front porch steps every billowing shade of purple and lavender lilac, my mother’s favorite flower, sweet breath drifting through the open windows: perfume of memory—conduit of spring. June The June bug on the screen door whirs like a small, ugly machine, and a chorus of frogs and crickets drones like Musak at all the windows. What we don’t quite see comforts us. Blink of lightning, grumble of thunder—just the heat clearing its throat. July Tonight the fireflies light their brief candles in all the trees of summer— color of moonflakes, color of fluorescent lace where the ocean drags its torn hem over the dark sand. August Barefoot and sun-dazed, I bite into this ripe peach of a month, gathering children into my arms in all their sandy glory, heaping my table each night with nothing but corn and tomatoes. September Their summer romance over, the lovers still cling to each other the way the green leaves cling to their trees in the strange heat of September, as if this time there will be no autumn. October How suddenly the woods have turned again. I feel like Daphne, standing with my arms outstretched to the season, overtaken by color, crowned with the hammered gold of leaves. November These anonymous leaves, their wet bodies pressed against the window or falling past— I count them in my sleep, absolving gravity, absolving even death who knows as I do the imperatives of the season. December The white dove of winter sheds its first fine feathers; they melt as they touch the warm ground like notes of a once familiar music; the earth shivers and turns towards the solstice.