City Park
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Shinrin-Yoku (Forest Bathing)
Ten years ago, just as medication was beginning to rein in my outrageous and dangerous bipolar mania, I quit a job that almost broke me and fled into the park. Continue reading
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Not Drunk Unless
Not drunk unless on leafbreath and godswink, my path doesn’t stagger; it wanders with care, following some loose rules about how I pass by, under the boughs of and around certain trees, usually widdershins, compassing the roots and boles and others bowing for a benediction where the arch of branches buttress the sky. The Crow Continue reading
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The Conga Beat of Wings
I was getting the side eye from birders in the Couterie Forest Arboretum yesterday for my drumming playinv on a small speaker on the strap of my water bottle. Little do they know I startled a hawk the other day turning a bend, long after they would have heard the drumming. Everything in that wood Continue reading
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Not Quite Wilderness
This is not wilderness, this curated forest arboretum: planted by the WPA then left undeveloped until Couturie Forest Arboretum was created. The boles are not blazed for lost wanderers, thankfully neglected by knife-wielding lovers in heated search of soft-yielding bowers. There are occasional labels on posts naming the trees as if a native son practiced Continue reading
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Sad Baritone Saturday
A sad baritone blowing big round. Jello-tremulous Os of the blues. That’s what started this ramble into a pleasant melancholia, a fizzy afternoon beer buzz of sadness not quite cheerless, simply there like a color in the air, a sky so blue and clear you can hear it, a faint hum beneath your feet, a Continue reading
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Forest Flâneur
I regularly walk in the strip of New Orleans City Park between City Park Avenue and the remains of Bayou Metairie, the only natural body of water among the WPA-dug lagoons. I don’t use the sidewalks but wend my way around and between the trees in an erratic path, clocking the radial roots to avoid Continue reading
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deadfall
deadfall isn’t death: a native feast for mushroom and ground cover, for all that crawls beneath the leaves and all that climb or call from trees. Continue reading
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Why Not A Dryad?
Why a water nymphin this featured fountainand not a dryad in this colonnade of bearded oaks old as Moses?There are pools in the wood.Just ask Acteaon. Continue reading
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An Anhinga
Saturday walking in the park All eyes down on their phones Across the water, an anhinga I’m rather fond of this. It jettisons 17 syllables to go straight to the heart of haiku. The anhinga, if you don’t know it, is a unique and marvelous bird. A fisher without water proof feathers, it perches periodically Continue reading
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The Bad Busker
The bad soprano busker is back rehearsing murder of a violin for the poor tourists who just want to eat beignets in peace The danse macabre of summer Sugar Plum Fairies melting in June’s heat, squawking like a collapsing accordion another Happy Birthday and then Anchors Aweigh and I wonder if come fall he’ll know 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 