City Park
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Killing Me Softly with K-9s
I go to the forest to manage the stress of living in this dysfunctional city and this cracker-ass backwards state and this disintegrating country. I go to hear song birds and the cries of the water birds, to the chorus frogs celebrating the puddly places after it rains, for the quiet when it comes. I… Continue reading
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Another Anecdote of a Jar
You were never meant to hold that much without breaking, the ad for some tincture promising happiness said. Don’t buy it.There are flowers and leaves and mushroomsenough in the forest. The only bottle you needis one for cool water so you can remain quietly with the unmolested medicine still rooted in the earth, both you… Continue reading
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Back to the Island
When the days are empty of work except for what I choose–reading and writing, some chores, the garden–I take long walks in the forest arboretum not to raise my heart rate but to lower it, to follow–after the admonition from yoga–the breath of everything. Lately my thoughts roam unleashed there, thinking of natural beauty in… Continue reading
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Not Drunk Unless
Not drunk unless on leafbreath and godswink, my path doesn’t stagger; it wanders with care, following some loose rules about how I pass by, under the boughs of and around certain trees, usually widdershins, compassing the roots and boles and others bowing for a benediction where the arch of branches buttress the sky. The Crow… Continue reading
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Not Quite Wilderness
This is not wilderness, this curated forest arboretum: planted by the WPA then left undeveloped until Couturie Forest Arboretum was created. The boles are not blazed for lost wanderers, thankfully neglected by knife-wielding lovers in heated search of soft-yielding bowers. There are occasional labels on posts naming the trees as if a native son practiced… Continue reading
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Lines on His 68th Birthday
(much) after Everette Maddox Atop the spoil pile left over from digging the lagoons whichslowly slides and subsidesback to the natural flatof this river bottom city In June’s mock-August swoon, after a difficult ascent withan old man’s AWOL big toesand the huff and puffof 50 years of cigarettes So many battles of my youthfought nearby,… Continue reading
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deadfall
deadfall isn’t death: a native feast for mushroom and ground cover, for all that crawls beneath the leaves and all that climb or call from trees. Continue reading
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Why Not A Dryad?
Why a water nymphin this featured fountainand not a dryad in this colonnade of bearded oaks old as Moses?There are pools in the wood.Just ask Acteaon. Continue reading
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Iris, Bayou Metairie
Dragonflies proclaimLunch to nibbling fishBy the irises Egrets stalkThe deadfall shallowsBehind the irises Passion purple, sun yellowBayou Iris celebrateSemana Santa Continue reading
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 