forest
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Not a Demon-Haunted World
Not a demon-haunted worldof the astronomer’s warningbut one spirit informed,knowing we are the conscious universelooking at ourselvesin the mystery of a treeunmediated by machines 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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Brother, Sister, Cousin
A friend gave me the common name of the frog I heard and recorded on a video of the ponded rain but said she couldn’t recall the scientific name. I don’t want to know the scientific names. I want to know the common names given by people not hypnotized by Linnaeus’ dissection of the world.… Continue reading
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Drifting Into Brautigan
The more time I spend walking in the forest the further I’m drifting into Richard Brautigan. I don’t fish but I like to watch the herons do it and I sometimes write about it, too. He’s tonic to the orchestral noise blaring at what might be the last Fourth of July. It’s all John Phillip Firework patriotism here… Continue reading
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Reading Pablo Neruda
and all the other reprobates, I think: broken people make art—and do other reprehensible, sometimes horrific malfunctional things. Artists step outside the bounds of propriety to describe it. Some are cast out because of social deformity. They are inherently transgressive. They sit away from the communal fire. They wander long in the woods. Some transgress into the… Continue reading
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The Only Worthy Lotus
Walking is meditation if it is morning chorus and kaleidoscopic green. Not stillness. Not silence. Not transcendence. Follow instead the breath of everything. I don’t want to escape this world but instead to live deeply within it. I don’t want to approach the lotus unless I can wade in to admire it. Walk widdershins around… Continue reading
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The Green Fellow
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,… Continue reading
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Return to Scout Island
Today was the first time I set foot on Scout Island in City Park since the 1960s. I had some unpleasant childhood experiences there: the Cub Scout den camp out when I burned myself on the Coleman lantern and my father and Uncle decided to treat it by pouring cold Dixie beer onto it, and… Continue reading
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A Venerable Tree
I realized I hadn’t been to see the old growth oaks along Bayou Metairie in the lawn-like front of the park. miss those venerable trees, a few of whom are special to me, so I went walking today in the forest arboretum looking for a venerable tree. There are some grand ones and not just… Continue reading
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Remember Me
I want to make a good impressionon the earth this forest to remember me like birdsong in the rain when all the rest of me is burnt bonemy life laid out at last (no cut flowersplease) at the Goodwill Store. 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 