Couterie Forest
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Reading Poetry to the Anhinga
I’ve done something to my achilles, possibly pushing way too hard into barefoot shoes, although at 69 it could be any number of things. I have, for example, somehow developed duck-footedness and often sit with my feet balanced on their ball, an anxiety thing that probably doesn’t do my achilles any good either. I was… 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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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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Return to Scout Island
Today was the first time I set foot on Scout Island in City Park since the 1960s. I had some unpleasant childhood experiences there: the Cub Scout den camp out when I burned myself on the Coleman lantern and my father and Uncle decided to treat it by pouring cold Dixie beer onto it, and… Continue reading
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A Venerable Tree
I realized I hadn’t been to see the old growth oaks along Bayou Metairie in the lawn-like front of the park. miss those venerable trees, a few of whom are special to me, so I went walking today in the forest arboretum looking for a venerable tree. There are some grand ones and not just… Continue reading
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What is the Ph of forest?
What is the Ph of forest when it’s littered with broken concrete returning to its elements: The highly-alkaline calcium hydroxide; the toxic Arsenic, Barium, Lead, and Mercury? Does someone monitor this in the arboretum, or is this place meant as a glimpse of the post-human world, the apocalyptic blossom of green, when the wild will… Continue reading
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consider yourself a ghost
You got to be a spirit. Don’t be no ghost — Rastaman the Griot consider yourself a ghost alone in the woods without other people television phone internetwhile life of all kinds continuesaround you in green and brownblossom color and bird song assomething from a dream this dream see your self as spirit in a… Continue reading
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Forest Thoughts
Is it my imagination or am I simply growing more perceptive the longer I walk in the forest? It seems the overcast filtered light spreads a Pantone rainbow of greens of the sort I’ve only seen in photos of the Northwest, and once in the Portland Japanese Garden in a drizzle. The soft scent… 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
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 