Badlands

Badlands

Here,
The pretty hills
The pretty hills

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 hospital behavioral center
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

The pretty hills
The pretty hills

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 colonizing
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

Red tailed hawk
The pretty hills
The pretty hills


Morning, 11 a.m.


by Ruth Nolan
copyright (c) 2010 Ruth Nolan
Ruth Nolan, June 25, 2010