Nanook of the North

The haptic of the trackside treespours past, the tangle       of snow-draped limbs, the treeswho care not what      or who they touch;when was it ever  white & black as it is nowat the beginning of the day  at the end of the week?A train is the mother      of films,scenes perceived & notentered: a lone man in a lumber yard,      a decrepit boat named “Lucky Sue,”      empty factories, hats & shoes& coats in the project trees,  a moving widow on a flurry      of water or silvercrystals, the silver Aran water      or the weeping windows& doors at home, the laughing wind      long ago in the eaves—      winteras consistent as death, the past  becomes old movies, which must be stored      below fifty degreeslike a corpseor they may surreptitiously catch firelike a body might.____Mark Lamoureux lives in New Haven, CT. He is the author of thee full-length collections of poetry: Spectre (Black Radish Books 2010), Astrometry Orgonon (BlazeVOX Books 2008), and 29 Cheeseburgers / 39 Years (Pressed Wafer, 2013). His work has been published in print and online in Cannibal, Denver Quarterly, Jacket, Fourteen Hills and many others. In 2014 he received the 2nd annual Ping Pong Poetry award, selected by David Shapiro, for his poem “Summerhenge/Winterhenge.”