forest
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I Ask The Trees
I ask the trees how to grow old slowly I see my face in a century of live oak barkRemain evergreen they say Welcomebirds & weather each season equallyStudy deadfall what rises out of it thrivingThe most ancient live oak is not eternal Continue reading
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Green Baptism
9‘Whether, as the intensity of seeing increases, one’s distance from Them, the people, does not also increase’I know, of course I know, I can enter no other placeYet I am one of those who from nothing but man’s way of thought and one of his dialects and what has happened to meHave made poetryTo dream… Continue reading
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Surrender
I was always troubled by the title of the beautiful John McLaughlin and Carlos Santana collaboration Love Devotion Surrender. Surrender was never an appealing option for me. I burn with a defiant Promethean fire only death will extinguish. And yet as I grow older, surrender calls me: not to the feet of the tin idol… Continue reading
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August Elderberries
August elderberriesengorged with summer begging to be plucked Continue reading
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Portal
Some days the forest is not far enough. I can still hear the cars speeding past just outside the gate and the distant rumble of the interstate that bisects the park. It is too close to what troubles, to what waits later, and chances are I have a list of things to do on the… 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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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
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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