Walking is meditation if it enters into sudden birdsong and kaleidoscopic green. Not stillness. Not transcendence. I don’t want to escape this world. I don’t want the lotus unless I can wade in to admire it.
I want to enter into this world as a duck enters water, as a towering tree enters the earth, to wear moss instead of clothes, for birds to land fearlessly on my arms, to find antlers I can tie on.
I want the villagers to fear me just a little, enough to leave me bread and beer and first fruits. I want the children to creep out to say they caught a glimpse of me. I want to vanish into a fireside story.
I want to find what little peace remains in a world gone off, contented to watch the hawks hunt and the crows scavenge, just the average and necessary savagery of a world in circular balance.
I want to be remembered as that figure in the woods glimpsed from a distance, one we all recognize from memories we never realized we all had until I quietly crossed your path.
The Green Fellow
About Me
Mark Folse is a provincial diarist and aspiring minor poet from New Orleans. His past blogging adventures included the Katina/Federal Flood blog wetbankguide on blogspot.com which David Simon told NY Magazine was one of three blogs that helped inform Treme, and Toulouse Street–Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans, which once outranked the Doobie Brothers on Google Search. His work has appeared in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The New Delta Review, Metazen, New Laurel Review, Ellipsis, What We Know: New Orleans as Home, Please Forward, The Maple Leaf Rag IV, and A Howling in the Wires (which he co-edited).
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Well Bottom Blues 
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