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On the beach
The Sun surveys hiscoming kingdom of scorched sandand motionless scrub. Where will the heronnest when the barren shallowsflash only with shell? Will the snakes returnto the sea when nothing elsestirs in the blank dunes? A bleached forest of pilingslike the salted trees in thebareness behind. The oil platforms offthis pleasant beach like standingstones left by… Continue reading
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The ragged hem of Ocean
February 26. Covered 172 miles. Cloudy sky, grey sea. Nothingness. February 27, Covered 94 miles. Blue sky, blue sea. Nothingness. — Two log entries from Bernard Moitessier’s The Long Way. This is not the ocean, these mild ripples washing the crowded shore. It is merely the edge of the thing, a ragged hem. The loud,… Continue reading
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Beach Proem After Olson
Black welk fragments and tiny shiny bits just where the surf defines the tideline, I choose a spit of sand where the beach turns and set out. There are no sea birds here among the beach people but past the tented encampments terns glide and stride on the wet sand as I do. One walks… Continue reading
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Marooned in a crowd
This is more of an obligation than a vacation. Brought to near the end of the road Fort Morgan Alabama, where the sea view features two oil platforms, to join in the celebration of my sister’s 50th wedding anniversary. No room for us in the giant beach house they rented, they treated us to a… Continue reading
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Suttree
I was mumbling last month about starting up a Bloomsday reading again a few weeks ago but dropped it. And I haven’t cracked my much sticky noted and underlined disintegrating binding copy this year. Instead I am currently readinf Suttree by Cormac McCarthy, and I’m feeling disposed to call it the American Ulysses. It’s as… Continue reading
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Vita Brevis
I hear the singing of the undertowwhere the anxious waves come and go. I watch it greedily leachaway the hot, inconstant sand from underneathFellini’s beached monster. Across the flooded beachthe café girl, angelic. I cannot reachher distant innocence from here. I turn my back on the fantasticand light another cigarette. Continue reading
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Calf foot blues
Stock bones boiling in this pot black, hissing gas ring hot night, a slow reduction to the elemental in the fan-stirred simmerof this gelatin evening. Continue reading
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Promiscuously Autobiographical
“I’m promiscuously autobiographical, but it’s never gotten me into trouble.” Samuel R. Delaney, interviewed by The New Yorker Continue reading
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Interrupted by Hummingbirds
Compose your life like a prose poem suddenly interrupted by hummingbirds mistaking a woman’s perfume for wildflowers in Arles. A fast and bulbous moon the only excuse necessary for hallucinatory episodes at the Starbucks counter, visualizing Cthulhu in the foam and blocking the concoction of monstrous coffee drinks. When confronted with a Don’t Walk sign,… Continue reading
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The Stars! The Stars!
It is possible that these great geniuses are only madmen, and that one must be mad oneself to have boundless faith in them and a boundless admiration for them. If this is true, I should prefer my insanity to the sanity of the others. Vimcent Van Gogh 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 