Couterie Forest
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Killing Me Softly with K-9s
I go to the forest to manage the stress of living in this dysfunctional city and this cracker-ass backwards state and this disintegrating country. I go to hear song birds and the cries of the water birds, to the chorus frogs celebrating the puddly places after it rains, for the quiet when it comes. I… Continue reading
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The Mind Concetrates
The mind wanders. The material concentrates. —Rae Armantraut , “Thrown” Concentrates only when the mind ceases to wander and the eye of the poet pauses at an object of curiosity or wonder, when the material is, like the repertoire of the comedian, the material. Through focus we conjure. My unquiet mind is as restless as… 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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Open Toes at the Wrong Party
“I went out to the hazel wood,Because a fire was in my head”— “Song of Wandering Aengus,” W.B.Yeats So I went out to the forest and forgot to change my shoes and decided just to walk in my slides wearing these open-toed bamboo brace things for my Achilles, trying not to catch anything between my… Continue reading
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Automatic Walking
I have an incorporeal compass insidewhich, when the trail splitsor crosses, knows which way to goas if the life inside chooses fromamong the countless greenshow to visit the feathered cousins & I visited green heron andsaw the egret atop the piling anhinga just a flash of wingshis sharp call across the lagoon & Soon City… 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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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
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 