birds
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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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My Five 5 O’clock Shadow
Why I go back to the park sometimes at 5:00 or 5:30. We’re good acquaintances. He sometimes visits the bench where I read earlier in the day, or salutes me with his head when I pass. He’s not giving up a good, shady spot if it’s just me. He only startles and bolts if I… Continue reading
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Learning From the Birds
I have loved what is beyond my reach so it’s no surprise I spend a lot of time alone with the water birds in the forest arboretum. I didn’t realize learning to appreciate beauty in this way was an emotional apprenticeship. The egrets are fly-away skittish but others–anhinga, green heron–will linger nearby comfortably in my… Continue reading
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Going Quiet in the Forest
For a forest friend Going quiet in the forest is exhilarant living.Leave your sugar frosted lattespeaker phone in airplane mode.Choose wild cherries and passion flowers.There are thrills in trills in the trees,the slow dance of coasting birds,frog song conga lines at dusk.Go quietly and with someonewho stoops to toad stools; stops, looksand listens with hawk-sharp… 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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Green Pentecost
I was raised from childhood to place my hand in the Holy Roman wound and found it cold and hollow. Now I am waiting for that Pentecostal moment not in a close room but in the wood, for green fire like leaves to descend, teaching us the words of the birds and the subterranean language… 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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Surfing on the Shore
I want to salt my hands in sand bits of silica diamonding themin the blue green Gulf glare away from concrete monuments to misunderstood Jimmy Buffett—where pelican and heron at rest stand still and permit me to passon the hard sand at the surf line—two shore creatures in our element 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
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 