Latin: “Sunt mihi Dei Acherontis propitii! Valeat numen triplex Jehovae! Ignis, aeris, aquae, terrae spiritus, Salvete!”
Translation: “May the gods of Acheron be favorable to me! Farewell to the threefold spirit of Jehovah — the Trinity! Welcome, you spirits of fire, air, water, and earth!”
—Czeslaw Miłosz’ adaptation of the invocation from Goethe’s Faust.
I have rejected heaven, favoring Earth with its spirits of water and air. I burn with the fire of life, and when it is extinguished, let me be ash. Let wildflowers rise.
In the forest I reject the hell of the complicated monsters of commerce, the only one we will be certain to know, guilty and innocent alike. What is an absent and invisible creator except another species of machine of our own invention, one which grinds us up to make our daily cannibal bread? Hell by our own hands, where avarice is the ring worn by its king.
There are angels here: anhinga, the various herons, the kites which save us this day from our discarded can mosquitoes, as we would save these trees from those who trespass against them. The cardinals and jays laugh at that other world while Carolina wrens and chickadees sing us sweetly home. Swing low, sweet moon, that chariots the tides. Swallow us whole, anointed with forest.
Welcome, you spirits
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, Trampoline, Unlikely Stories, Peauxdunque Review, LMNL Anthology, 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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