City Park
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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
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Iris, Bayou Metairie
Dragonflies proclaimLunch to nibbling fishBy the irises Egrets stalkThe deadfall shallowsBehind the irises Passion purple, sun yellowBayou Iris celebrateSemana Santa Continue reading
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Stations of the Moss
I have made the Stations of the Moss. There is no better resurrectionfor a troubled soul this side of magic than to walk oak alley paths. Continue reading
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Bayou Metairie: the birds
Submerged anhinga U-bird cruises periscope neckup looks for dinner victims The wild ducks feed on weed on the lagoon’send far from the breadbirds Lordly and isolate heronpoised in a cypress kingof wingéd fishers Beggar geese the direct avian descendantsof velociraptors The dark-beaked heroncalled Little Egret, solitaryat lagoon’s far end True egrets flockwhere food might bebeneath… Continue reading
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Me…and my…puddle
Just the trees and the critters and me in the drizzly old live Oak stand. Two distant dog walkers exiting and later a guy in a Bebop cap and goatee idly wandering the lanes between the trees; looks like someone you mught bum a smoke or a light from just for an interesting bit of… 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 