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Hiraeth
I’m almost 69 and so still listening to ‘70 synthesizer glam folk. I love the new primitivist, drum pounding, guttural throat singing stuff but Clannad echoes with Welsh Hiraeth, German Fernweh, words American English lacks for want of imagination, that nostalgia for a place that never existed and I would drift there for an afternoon… Continue reading
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Ghosts of the Flood
Originally published on Wetbankguide.blogspot.com om October 2005 ” . . . so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many . . . “The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot Sometimes I feel them, my wife told me, their spirits, as I’m driving down the street. All that suffering, she explains, all those people. As… Continue reading
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We Live in Smoke
we live in smoke not as the ancestors did old stories around the fire passing a pipe, the dark flavor of roasted meat we suck the unburnt carbon of our world as if we each just lit a cigarette 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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The Crime of St. Boniface
I knew that place, those trees, well. I had given the shaded apse beneath the perfect arch of branches that shaded a soft place of leaf letter over cool earth a name: Oaken Hof, from the germanic word for a temple. I dropped a pin on Google Maps of that spot. When the bank broke… 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, 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 