The Winter Visitor

[ShiningKnight]

The Winter Visitor

There's something living underneath our floor.

We aren't sure what it is, or if it wants

to scratch its way up to where we are.

We drown it out sometimes. Sometimes we can't.

But nights, up from the floorboards, in the dark

it starts again, the rough, irregular

thump and rasp — the creature hard at work

in some crevice, god knows, of the old house.

In some dark place the mind is loathe to venture,

it comes and goes without any permit.

And that its force cannot consider us,

is wholly ignorant of who we are,

seems monstrous in its total independence.

It is not trapped: It cannot be let out.

Tess Taylor

2003 Morton Marr Poetry Prize

Southwest Review

Volume 89, Number 1