nature
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Game Over
If the AI revolution brings about an age of abundance, as Elon Musk has begun to suggest lest we bring out the guillotine, and no one goes hungry or burns with avarice; if the computers not only cure all our diseases and extend our lives but solve every puzzling mathematical theorem and scientific mystery for… Continue reading
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Welcome, you spirits
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… Continue reading
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Thauma
Thauma (Greek: θαῦμα) is a noun meaning wonder, marvel, or astonishment. Etymologically, it derives from a root meaning “a thing to look at” and is related to the verb theaomai (to gaze at or view). In Biblical Greek, the term appears twice in the New Testament, referring to a concrete marvel that evokes emotional astonishment:… Continue reading
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Quiet Fireworks
I thought Yates’ bee loud gladewas all fanciful talk until I heardthe elderberries’ high mass sung 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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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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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
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 