The Man with No Hands

a man with no hands
came to my writing class and sat there awhile
before he told me
he forgot to bring a pen
he is from San Bernardino
where I was born
at a hospital that squarely faces
a cemetery to the north
where my maternal grandpa and grandma are buried
in a remote spot without a headstone
I know, because one day a few years ago
I went there, with Tarah, then 16
and went a little headfirst
into emotional promiscuity
when I discovered the plot was unmarked,
a kindly golf cart driver,
the man who makes the rounds
on the neat little roads
day by day
to ensure
that no one robs a grave
came up to me, offered to help,
I think he was checking me out,
as Tarah later said. No matter,
we ended up finding
where my grandparents
ended up dead, and it made me feel
exhumed, in a paperweight way,
a few lines for a few poems
pinned down
before a Santa Ana wind
molests the pages at the fringe
and the print becomes unreadable
the hand forgets to move
the mind remembers
its awful phantom pain
of limbs removed years ago
to make way
for new stories

Ruth Nolan c 2009 Ruth Nolan

Prayer Shot

2% organic milk, and I've been told by a trusted confidante that things tend to go the way they've already been going, and with a 2% effort, energy moves in the direction you want things to go. And Tarah and Alex are here this afternoon, planning their wedding. It's to be in January, at Silver Rock Resort. Right at the watermark of the ancient inland sea shoreline. I've discovered recently that I live precisely where the beach for the Sea of Cortez once was, northernmost.

So today it's 113 degrees, el desierto, and I thawed a frozen solid half gallon of 2% fat organic milk on the supernovaheated front sidewalk in 15 minutes or less. Last night, I was in L.A., Venice, Silver Lake and Hollywood. Had the privilege and high honor of being invited to read at Beyond Baroque, the "ground zero" of the L.A. poetry scene since the 70's. There are still trippy lit-mags and zines lining the racks, cool things done on typewriter and mimeograph, and featuring L.A. poetry O.G.'s like Bukwoski.

Copies of my odd-horizoned desert lit mag Phantom Seed #1 already there, and crappy copies of the first run of my 2007 chapbook "Dry Waterfall." I switched those for a few that are good, and made a prayer shot with issue #2 of Phantom Seed, profiling that in front of the few issues of #1. Issue #3 soon to be, and the cool Pacific ocean breeze, sluicing across the open back of my risque halter top. The silk and beaded one I bought while shopping with my friend Swamiji in some exotic store, in NYC, I think, when we were on a Bhakti poetry tour a few years ago.

And circling back to L.A., Jet Blue is what I always fly these days to and from the east coast. I was in very erudite reading company, and honored to be invited - a fundraiser for and celebration of Askew literary magazine, a newspaper-folio style which comes out of Venice, CA and edited by poets Phil Taggart and Marsha de la O. My poetry has appeared in a past issue, and I'd like to contribute again. Nothing quite like hearing a spray of 20 incredible poets/readers, all at the top of their game and on point. The lights on the podium+microphone were too-bright, I couldn't see a thing except the page below me, and three tiny plastic bottles of Evian water lining the left, and finally one of the poets, who recited an excellent poem by memory, twisted open one of the bottles, but didn't drink it till he left the stage. Pivot, swish.

I rewrote my poem "Maturity Class," and read that. Made it a little more cutting-edge although I chickened out and cut some of the edge out right before I read. Funny that my poem was straddled in position between sex-sexuality poems right before me and right afterwards. I had a line about the daughter in the poem gagging on her milk, when reading a certain chapter, but switched it to the mother/narrator gagging on green tree (assonance with the word, "maturity,") and I've learned recently that lowfat or skim milk is the favorite drink of sustenance, in lieu of food, for anorectic women and girls.

I can't publish the poem here right now. It's been accepted for the upcoming issue on "gender" in Poemeleon magazine, which requires first-time online publishing rights, and has already been print-published in Pacific Review magazine. How many times can I change that poem around? I like to think I'm getting more punk and rebel and daring, which I've always been, just now it's sprinkling into my poems, or maybe sort of volcanic-erupting - I always wanted to be a singer in a rock band!

Afterwards, I drifted off the freeway, gratefully, onto the gritty streets of Hollywood, Silver Lake, my brother Jerry a cool DJ who lives in a walkup apartment above a much-filmed liquor store. He ferries us through backstreets to Thai Town in his Mercedes S-8, and Mike says he'd just as soon grab something from McDonald's and ride around all night, but I insist on real food, so we ended up at Astroburger a local S.V. hangout spot, and ate greasy patty melts while being stared down by two tables of L.A. cops. The hollywood restaurants were all full with Friday night partiers. No more pretend, no more late night food finding games. We didn't want to wait for something respectable. Process it all today with the milk.

Back to the kids. They may or may not rent my house from me, while I move...? I've agreed to pay for the flowers, for the wedding, and I'm numbing all this wedding overload and the shock of how fast everything is going down with that, out by writing on my blog, in and out of consciousnss, as Tarah says. They're on the couch, I'm at the kitchen table, across the room from them.

Huh? Oh yeah, high end Mexican food for the catering. Uh, yeah, Silver Rock Resort for the reception, where they hold the Bob Hope classic. Umm, what? Wedding dresses, oh yeah, oh yeah, I'm with you. Who's more 23 right now, me or her? I distinctly realize I'm a coward, hiding behind this tiny laptop screen, tapping little letters into words on the fingernail-dented keyboard. What, Tarah? Oh, where do I want to eat? Ruth, you are totally ignoring me? If you don't want to go we are leaving right now. Where do you want to go? Mom!! Okay okay, just a few more words....

I'm getting that feeling of my life heading for a cliff. What am I going to do, by myself, alone in the world, without her? Shoulda gotten married years ago, but that's one of those ass-kicking hindsight things that do absolutely no good right now. This is something I can hardly believe, a tattoo getting bigger and bigger, an empty nest, awful cliche, and mine isn't nestled gracefully in some beautiful elm tree next to a lovely singing creek, but warped by desert summers and embedded in a tangled, mace-fisted colla cactus tree, that mismatched lopsided nest now warped and branded deeper and deeper onto my forehead. So this is the shit that sends moms into full tilt boogie, how long can I keep playing pinball, odd chords of the Who's "Tommy" in my video-eye and I'm in jr. high again. Good. They're on the couch together, giddy in their plans, and sidetracked leafing thru some wedding guidebook stuff.

I've got just a minute here. We're off for spaghetti and iced tea at Mario's. And I'm paying for flowers. It's going to be okay. And more. Who will I work with? Goldfish pretzels sink and swim. As they tell me, assure me, you can prove it by the watermarks on rocks nearby, yes, this whole town was once under the sea.

things missed + gained

It's a predictably hot Friday in Palm Desert. I'm inside. Ceiling fan and air purifier rhythms collide. Webster's dictionary added a plethora of new words today, among my favorite is the phrase "sock puppet." Semantics and word play are my #1 things. Besides hiking, whitewater rafting/canoeing, bicycling, camping, all things close to the earth and inhabiting my poetic body and soul. Dreams, Reflections, Memory. By Jung. A book I need to read. Some confirmation and guidance in my current status of "it's complicated" and "I'm not 46, I'm 23 again!!!!" Sometimes, even 17, or 13. Relationship status should really indicate, "one's relationship with oneself. Or selves."

My brother John is having a minor surgery in Oakland, CA today. My mom's cousin in Ohio last week suffered a terrible tragedy. Thieves broke into his house at 2 am to get at his rare coin colletion (people he didn't know) and ended up breaking his neck. If he lives, he will be a quadriplegic for the rest of his life. Last night, I was lightened considerably by leading my creative writing workshop at the Riverside Library (touche ending for a rough day)and hanging out with a group of wonderful friends afterwards, who are all part of my group - Mike S, Mike C, Jean, and Wendy. I am so grateful for the wonderful people in my life. Do they even know how much their friendship and circle of goodness mean to me? Especially last night.

Hopscotch to the week. A week of moods, thin cirrus clouds high, a new and much better gynecologist than my previous one met with me, and guess what, I can still have kids. My poetry babies + maybe more. Therapy appointments and a face-cleansing facial, shopping for new clothes. Since Tarah was not with me at Ross Dress for Less, I was on my own, and I boldly asked every passerby in the store to help me decide what was good and what was not. At the discount dress rack, a rarity place for me to be, I asked a woman who turned out to have a great sense of humor.

She said, "I know how to shop, honey. I'm from Dallas, was born with a silver spoon in my mouth and it's still there. The shopping is terrible here in the desert, even with all the high-end stores, but let me help." First thing she said was don't buy any hippy things, because I probably had a lot of them in my closet, and the 60's are gone (how did she know? Oh yeah, I was wearing a tie dye shirt.) She picked out some awesome sun dresses for me. Only in Palm Desert. I am thinking I could probably get by slipping Brindle the Big Dog into stores if I put a "working dog" collar on him - who's to know? He deserves to be there as much as the diamond-collared chihuahuas.....

Anyway, got the clothes home and Tarah looked through them and was hugely impressed. MOM, how did YOU pick out these things? Well....a pair of Coach-brand sandals that turned out to be very expensive, a bitchy high end. She took a few for herself (they ended up not fitting me) and modeled for Alex, then made me try on a couple of the dresses. Alex was very impressed. Oh yeah, and some slick heels I already had, used to wear them to designer events in my Swami days - good luck hunting, Alex said, as he hugged me goodybe. Tarah drifted off in a cloud of lovely light turqoise. They were on their way to breakfast at 1 pm, and they'd been planning to drive to Berkeley and back in two days and bring back some furniture he left in his college dorm there, but it turns out after myriad drama phone calls in the past few days to me - from Tarah - they didn't go after all. Hired a mover to bring the stuff down here. Wonder how much that is costing, and who pays. Don't ask, don't tell. Oh, that, and they want to get married in January. Shit, I forgot to buy underwear at the store. That's why I originally went in there! I did get a faux giraffe print purse. The one without the chemicals that can cause cancer.

Sock puppet. Be someone online and no one will ask or tell. God, only 2 more weeks and Tarah will be 21. July 28th. On the 27th, my nephew Mikhael will be 13. AGHWYEI what happened to the babies and toddlers! I want to get a tattoo on my left bicep, with the name "Tarah" in beautiful script, and two pictures overlapping, one of her as a blonde-ish curly haired toddler with big blue-green eyes, and one now, with her wise and lovely 1/4 Sioux Indian face, long brown hair, and compassionate gaze.

Live Through This

I just scarfed a 300 calorie package of Pepperidge Farms mini chocolate chunk dark chocolate Nantucket crispy cookies. How this connects to my memories of childhood summers spent in Southampton, Long Island - clamming, fishing on my uncle's boat, off the dock of the family bungalow before celebrities moved in, I will never know. My Aunt Eileen, my favorite aunt, still living there, who gave me tootsie pops and encouraged me to love her beautiful Irish Setter, Tarah, back when I was a little kid, is on hospice care. In her 80's now and not doing well. My Uncle Bobby, pure Italian and a huge-hearted guy, is caring devotedly for her.

It makes me so very sad. Wish I were there right now, back in 1969. Sand dunes, the ocean kind. My beautiful aunt, my dad's older sister, who cared for him when he was a little boy, and so very Irish-looking with her fair skin and red hair. She has always been my queen, and you can also guess where the inspiration came for my daughter's name. The world then innocent, between my long dark hair and singing "Row Your Boat" while my Aunt Catherine (dad's sister) paddled me and a boatload of boys (cousins and brothers, I, the only girl) off the dock. I remember when my big cousin Carl rescued me from the ocean, when I sliced the bottom of my left foot open on a piece of glass, holding me close to his chest with kindness and love while I cried and cried. That memory has always sustained me.

I'm in the desert, California. Yeah. Far from the north Atlantic shore. So I spend my afternoon, in between spins on the stationary bike while reading a stack of tabloids, all these not-so-ancient celebrities going dead on us all at once and it's a full moon tonight, I was also just outside throwing a tennis ball for the dogs and watering my palm trees and hardy sunflower plants - my afternoon on the Internet, chatting on facebook and catching up on emails, it's nice to feel so connected to family and friends, colleagues, writers, even while spinning away in a healing solitude in my own summerly home. Phone calls and facebook. My mom, my brother John, my friend Ethan, the doctor's office. I answer none. When my friend Mike calls, we talk for an hour or more. In the mid-afternoon, bane of a July day, a wonderful young friend and poet, Zac, called. I talked to him, too, and we tossed about the idea of a group excursion to Deep Creek hot springs. He has a knack Later, Facebook, on and on, I change my profile pictures to ones of me smiling full-on, pictures from 2 or 3 years ago. It's all good. People comment on my silly phrases, and I comment on theirs. Feels coffee shop bonding-good.

Tarah and Alex stop by, Tarah gasps at the cost of tuition $$ she owes Pitzer College for that last semester when she came home early and forgot to un-enroll....apparantly she is converting to Catholicism, though from what, I don't know. I know, I forgot to get her baptized when she was born, but I was raised a strict Catholic, after all, never left the church. Well, well, well. They leave. The empty nest gets bigger and bigger all the time. Like there never were any birds living here, just some wasted tree with an unusable "V". Yeah, and that tree that fell down in my yard recently. Nature speaks. What exhalation from tonight's full moon?

Poetry readings. On the road, hugging wild mountains and shouldering through passes on two lane highways and wide freeways, very California, if you didn't already know. negotiating urban traffic jams and finding places on unfamiliar city streets. For a good part of the past two days. I drove the two hours back and forth from the low desert, over the Santa Rosa Plateau - Pinyon, Anza, down to Temecula on Hwy 74 and 371, then onto the I-15 south to Escondidio. Had a nice time and made some new friends - and met other poetry folks I already know. It was a good reading with some fine poets. Release party for the San Diego Poetry Annual, guess their coup this year was publishing a few poems by the noted Dorianne Laux. I was in an afternoon workshop with her in Palm Desert a few years ago, a wonderful day.

So I'm honored to have had my poem "Forest Falls" included, too. They were going to publish my poem "Falling Star," too, but it's rather long and there was a lack of room. Reading last night at Back to the Grind in Riverside, and also this Friday at Beyond Baroque as part of a lineup for Askew magazine contributors. I'm so happy to be back on board with this all. I'll be doing a guest poetry session, for the third year in a row, for my friend Don Kingfisher Campbell's Occidental College-upward bound program for teens. A lot of fun. I miss working with high school kids. Poetry readings, the people who turn out, the alt-culture generated, has become a central part of my life. It's so much better than TV or remote control.

Live
through
this

Palo Verde Part 3, two left in my yard

the Palo Verde legacy goes on....I even wrote a poem about them awhile back. A man named Lucino Leon, who does landscaping, and was connected to me by my kind neighbor across the street, cut the tree down on Monday morning. I stepped out through the gate rather early, and was surprised by the open space, the grind of a chainsaw, the tree already mostly down, and high cumulus clouds with a dark, widespread underbelly....humidity and a rain possibility and filtering sun. He'd already consumed half a huge thermos of ice water. I was on coffee, barely, in the tall cat mug that's missing its handles. A bit hot. What....does it mean. About my formidable ability to love, and miss, my faux trees? About my capacity to handle an emergency? About the idea that it's time for me to clear my view and move move move? The trees are falling down and dying for me, except for one, front and center and damn strong. A trilogy, a triage nurse has come and gone, a sort of Father Son and Holy Ghost, a wholesome nature-kind of menage a trois, now down to menage a deux.


view looking northeast....new view...of the golf course and Little San Bernardino Mountains, which mark the transition zone-line of demarcation between the westernmost fringe of the Colorado-Sonoran desert where I live, and the start of the higher, northern reaching Mojave Desert

and there is actually a nuclear power plant called Palo Verde, west of Phoenix. Hmm. I used to get a shiver down my spine when I'd pass it, south of the I-10, Oz-Land apparition with domed....reactors? scaping out of the middle of nowhere. It's 2.5 hours of flat open brutal desert, that I-10 from the River to Phoenix. I used to do it without A/C in my Jeep, when I lived in Arizona, frozen bottles of water packed on my neck, melting at an unbelievably rapid pace. Now I can barely handle summer in the hottest desert where I live, even with high-cranked AC in home and car.


the stump....


view of the gated front yard - a dead palo verde - was healthy until this spring. I think some type of nasty winged termite got into it and it withered away. One down, maybe one more to go, and then maybe I'll get the ladder out and get Alex and Tarah back and trim the one in the frontyard so I can back out of the driveway without my car paint getting scraped. It's one thing to get scratched while doing tricky manuevers on desert dirt roads, a little closer, say, to some cool trailhead or a little farther from whatever is weighing me down, edging out and honing in on clarity and a view so quite you might, perhaps (is this cliche?) hear the sun coming up, or the moon talking to you--and another thing to get scratched by some dumb overwatered tree in your, sigh, boring old driveway. Going into the desert. All these years. Better than meds, and who's to know, or care? What of all those holy men, Jesus, having visions in the desert and sparking a new religion that's thrived and endured for 2k years? The best place in the world, to listen for God. In fact, I have a friend, R, who sold his house in El Cerrito hills with a perfect view of the Golden Gate Bridge and he went way out there, a few years ago, with his prayer beads and a small bedroll in a 1974 Toyota pickup with a shell that only goes 60 mph at best, and no one has heard from him since.


and a desert flower for you - in my very own yard. It loves water and leftover coffee grounds, and I think some of that broken ceramic cat mug handle, maybe some beads from a necklace that exploded in the front yard one night somehow, are in its nestly little watering trench, too. The tree comes down on me. It was.

What Repeats Itself, Circularly

A voice said, Look me in the stars
And tell me truly, men of earth
If all the soul-and-body scars
Were not too much to pay for birth.

--Robert Frost

I posted this Frost poem to my blog last summer,
and here it is again, for the flavor of our times....

I see fragmentation
so I put the laptop on "defrag" mode

What Repeats Itself

I see people circling on freeways,
the circling
of red tailed hawks above
ancestral Cahuilla land
in Redlands, Box Springs Mountains,
at the Santa Ana River
close to downtown Riverside
with its Mission Inn,
realize there were no Mission Indians,
only slaves,
now the old asistencia on Barton Road
sits by Loma Linda mental hospital
and the monument of de Anza
adjacent to the river,
stippled with graffitti, urine, blood

so I begin to live in circles,
repeating the same affirmations
listening to NASA voyager recordings
of outer space over and over again
making the rounds from Palm Desert
past Chino Canyon, where all of
creation was begun
through the shouldered gap
of San Gorgonio Pass
through Badlands, Riverside, Redlands
the I-10 to the 60 to the 91 south,
and looping back,
passing Mary Jane Cemetery

and back home,
after easing downhill
through the windmill farms
I see open space
where once there was a tree, views
of the little San Bernardino mountains
a bit more breeze
and I want to photograph the absence,
frame it with memory, now I can see
familiar patterns of stars,
a better view of passing satellites
tracing their faithful circumference
around the earth faster than planets do

it will give me hope, I hope
I hope I hope I hope
that things really are connected,
better this than the whip of thorned
cactus stinging me in the face
every time I stepped into the front yard,
the sad fact of a bird's nest tossed
onto the ground by a blast of wind,
the hooks of religions that rope us in,
the dams that block us all,
the demon intaglios can't be pulled
to the sea on the Colorado River
anymore from the tops of canyon walls
the water is re-assigned
before it reaches the sea,

tell me there is no obsessive
compulsive disorder here,
just a smooth meditation
of people walking the same
pilgrimages, embellishing here,
pruning here, entirely colonializing
over there, new volunteers,
a deeper groove in the old flood
channels each time the heavy
rains push water over the top,
magical strata revealed in rock,
unimagined layers of sand
richer in color and theme
the same stories played out over
and over again, circularly

Ruth Nolan
6.30.09

St. Michael.....the first view

the first one to visit
in April just before Easter Day
as I tripped across that crack
was a 20 year old Marine
from Minnesota stationed in 29 Palms
shortly before the swine flu eruption
and soon to be 21
only three months older than my daughter, of course
she was scandalized when I copped to it,
"oh mom," and rolling her eyes
and he told me
he could hear
the corn growing
back home
when he smoked pot on a john deere tractor
while plowing row after row
and watched the red tailed hawks
widen their wings and circle low
I was an English professor previously
and now I am a devout word cunt

he found me on craigslist
not long after I posted the MILF ad
you see, my sort of boyfriend
did something that made me a little crazy
and then that boy sent pictures of himself
with sister and mom, and smiling
chaotic cramped apartment in the background,
a routine midwestern crucifix on the wall
and I texted him on and on
while my mother drove me
to the hospital
how little did he know
but it was a damn good ad, he said
and that's what caught his attention
women your age are awesome, accomplished,
uh huh, uh huh, uh huh

I took him to a ritzy party
on a Saturday during my treatment,
weekends free, you see, but carefully scripted
baby steps for me, a sip of his too strong margarita
"help yourself," I said
these people are fucking rich
look how many ponds and waterfalls
on their 160 acre property
and that resort next door, see?
Al Capone stole that from the Indians
and made it his hideout home.
That kid was quick,
strong and strong, and tall,
he could step large and wide
what of posh designer illnesses
of the interior could he know about
he wasn't even twenty-one
and I had to vouch for his I.D.

Fun, to sit by the estate's faux lake,
leaning into his solid crotch
while he lightly stroked my hair,
introduce him to my upscale friends
and watch them gag, their erudite
minds ticking, me looking a little
under the weather, perhaps, and not
too talkative while he told a writer
friend that he had read "Johnny Get Your Gun"
while sitting on an artillery tank
in Iraq just last fall
and laughed about it
better than porn,
better than the pig-butt sandwiche
or pork a la king in the MRE's,
I can't really blame her for edging away
and giving me a what-the-fuck look,
although she didn't come out and say it,
she has a best selling romance novel, too.

And I think I saw the boy,
after I nestled into him and slept,
hovering in a dream above my bed
his hands folded in GI Joe prayer
sent to stave off certain war,
keeping the bad guy away from me,
the entire country, if you want to know
it's what he's trained to do
and he's literary, too
there are good drugs
to take care of this, the doctors
said, the bad ones are what brought you down
better weapons in our fight against this
disease, the old arsenals just don't hold,
with these, we can redraw
your inner mental map, it's a wedge of
countries torn apart,
borders can always be re-drawn

and it was him, interrupting my intake
by texting jokes about his day,
all the dirty stuff guys will say
when surrounded only be their fellow men
while I sat in a hospital waiting room
waiting to be assessed
thinking maybe I was okay
and could go home again
and that he'd be there, arms outstretched,
gawking at my thong sticking out
above the low waistline of my blue
juicy couture pants and saying over and
over again, I've never seen a woman your
age dress like that
or look so fucking hot
all I've known is the corn
in August, rising fast, splitting hairs
it's nice to lie spread eagled
in between the rows
I can count the individual syllables
it's time to plant in June.

by Ruth Nolan