Forest Falls

If you hike with me, if you really see,
you will climb dangerous rock scree
past the "do not go further" signs
at the bottom of the waterfall
in the San Gorgonio Wilderness,
where the road ends and the
black bears bang trash can lids
at night to scare the campers away,

water crashing here from 9,300 feet

to a little over the elevation of 7,000

in one swift, religion-affirming drop.

You can ask my daughter,
I brought her here when she was three
and the rhapsody of ice water brought
her to her little knees, something
skinned clean, she's 20 years old now

and just a little younger than you. It was
a baptism of a sort, we didn't make it
to church, I was raised Catholic,
and she was not. The water is our choir.

The Indians who gathered here,
some who still do, to gather acorns,
collect red mud for firing pots, Serrano,
Chemehuevi on break from fruit picking
at nearby Gillman Ranch, Cahuilla taking
a swim break from cattle herding, the
shaman, he lives at the bottom of the pool

and he talks to the white deer and the

nukatem, get too close, they'll drown you.

And if you hike with me, innocence is lost.
There is no such thing as love, only the
brutal windmilling of legs and arms,
flailing on the cliff edge, minds set on sitting
in the water at the bottom of the tallest fall,
where the water might pummel the weak
to the crush of its slippery pond, huge logs
of jeffery pine have found their way here,
broken glass, chunks of giant stone.

You have a different name than he,
and my daughter will no longer hike with me.
It's a brave and silly thing, to hike with me,
past drunks who misread the winding mountain
road en route here and smash into a cliff,
Forest Falls is a very dangerous place

And indeed, we are solemn, hearing the drums,
in our fat-tire procession past their fates,
the knifed water must be plastering their hair,
too, just like ours, and you think I am a saint
because I've transported you across the water
and I'm bringing you home safe, a light smile
and your skin sharp with a melted sting

and it's summer, the low time of year,
little do you know of the ice, the flooding,
the time I nearly jumped from the high ledge
time and space and stories merge more
neatly and make more sense that way
but driving slowly home was my destiny

it's just because I'd go to church later that day,
never mind the light speed of water
and its cold convenience, overturning boulders
and homes as it races and curves to the low places
of desert and sea, swinging its wild hips past
the village crouched at its frightening edges
the way you wrecklessly pursue me.

Fool's Gold

Every winter morning,
a flirtatious wink of light,
the mirage on the dry lakebed
shimmering across the desert.


I awaken to this view, thirsty.
Unlike the tourists, I do not
come here for a December tan,
the faux palm tree scenery,

days in the heat and sun.

I hope for a cool drink,
the relief of dip and paddle,
but seeking relief here
will only leave me aching

from the small arch of my back.

Instead, I close the shades.
I want to put my canoe on the water
before it disappears, but by noon,
the sun will be too cruel, too bright.

It is better to stay inside

while sun blisters the earth.
and the backbone of my boat
stays parked upside down
in my barren backyard,

elegant sand dunes billowing,
shifting in the parched breeze,
rearranging themselves into
fine-edged, smooth faced curves

tucked in against the rising wind

c. Ruth Nolan 2008

Poetry @ Palm Desert Virtual Art, Poetry Gallery

The City of Palm Desert has a virtual art gallery...

I worked awhile back with the curator and had a few of my poems poster, along with slide photography. The site needs updating, and the poems of mine are from 5 or 6 years ago, but I like the feel and hope to help build this into a bigger, better, more expansive site.

http://www.pdvirtualgallery.com/ruth_nolan.htm

Enjoy-a-boy....

Land of Love

Response to “Wild Boars, India 1944,” Milford Zornes

It's never clear when one can be certain of

sand dunes, curled through centuries of sun

the shifting borders of the land of love: India

with her wind-cut canyons, cleavage of gritty hugs

alien to the land-face, shaven to the faintest nub

clear and smudged, soldiers in this land of love

too hot to walk by day,

too frigid winter nights

the cobra’s tree-hidden attack

on the ticklish inner thigh,

the wild boars’ slow daytime grazing,

slow tracks marred by the quick prints

of shuffle and death by mud,

a refugee's only home

to be erased too soon in monsoon flood,

rearranged, a buried mystery

how can the soldiers, the families near the

trees, the tourist in me, negotiate this treachery

of borders always shifting in the land of love

here an ancient ocean once uncurled its tongue

But now the once-soothing sea dehydrates,

salt the only flavor, fresh blood quick dried,

the low braying of calves being born,

headlock clicking of horn on horn

the longtime sideways of

death and life, unshorn

and I'm left to wonder what pulls me here

to this gritty world, the soldiers, in their

stealth reconnaissance and invading

the foreign land, still, a form of home

at once known and unknown

in the shifting borders of the land of love

July 31, 2008

Copyright 2008 Ruth Nolan

July Good Bye

A last day of a long month, melted in mouth summer
31 joys of July, and we've had summer rain
not lingering too long but waking us up
at dawn mid-month with bowling alley continuous
thunder. Lightning zigging the pale clouds.
Tarah turns 20 this month. 20 years ago
I was in an Apple Valley hospital on my back,
epidural-stung and jellyfish bellied. She was born.
Long afternoons with a new baby and spinal headache
at my parents' house on Corwin Road, she asleep in
a tiny bundle of my arms, the pine trees on the old
ranch house and their needle-lifting singing on those
hot afternoons, the wind blows nicely on the Mojave
on desert summer days. This month, working long hours
on the desert anthology for Heyday, a monsoon-breaking
effort with zillions of changes and last-minute tinkerings.
Back and forth with Gayle at Heyday and Jeff the assistant
in downtown Riverside, mega-copying and fed-expressing
at the Kinko's on Magnolia. July 4th the blah of fireworks,
here in the Ritz Lands, resorts in nearby Indian Wells
(next door and across the street) have displays many times
during the year so it's not a novelty anymore. Two canceled
vacations to the beach, too busy working. Teaching the
Inlandia Writers Workshop at Riverside Library. One drive
to the Santa Rosa Mountains on the old dirt road backside
with Phil, to Dripping Spring, an hour on washboarded in and
out canyon pillaging. A real adventure. Cool and lofty up top.
Saw a nephrologist this month and it was made official, SSRI's
were giving me hyponatremia, a state where the kidneys lose
too much sodium and compensate with water retention. Nice
bike rides, 8, 10 mile clips on eves that aren't too hot this month.
Can only ride after dark in July. We have had a mellow month
temp-wise for Palm Desert, not much over 110, which is a joy.
Still too hot, and my AC was out for three days. Lots of
Hanging Around the Fort. Swimming in the pool, watering
the sunflowers and morning glories and marigolds and mint
in the garden. August will be a time to be off. We're heading north
to the redwoods and eastern Sierras. Adios, another July.
20 years of mid-summer hello's and goodbyes.

Poem: Slash X Ranch

She handed me a mirrored butcher knife.

Then came the noon chucks, a fifth of Vodka.

My hair was still wrapped in the French braid

knotted with her strong fingers the day before

while I was teaching my high school English class.

She had removed her long red nails, told me she

Planned to shank her mother in the back that day

so I drove her far into the desert after school.

We hiked a mountain behind an old cattle ranch.

I fingered the splintered cross stuck in rocks,

my initials carved at 14 with my brother's knife.

It had been many years since I'd last been here.

I could still see my parents' house, wondered

how easy it would be for one of us to slip and fall.

At school, she had confided in her journal to me

that she once threw a desk at a mean teacher,

that she'd lived in a crack house South Central LA,

that she'd already had four abortions, many dads.

I wanted to give her a gift-- a bleached coyote skull,

maybe the rattle or papery skin of a dead snake,

a bracelet of rusty barbed wire from the corral,

a memento of the school year we spent together.

Instead, she carved her gang name on the cross,

told me that she wanted to fix hair for the dead.

copyright 2008 Ruth Nolan

dedicated to Shivonne from Goodwill HS, Victorville CA

Legend of Your Moon

You created me, the brother who got people right,
not the twin who made them face-backwards,
or into ludicrous stone-hens, you made me Moon,

delight of the people, beautiful sister smiling in her
room, a perfect, orbed syllable. And then, you
violated me, in ways unspeakable, you knew your

heart belonged to Coyote, and he roasted your
skin, the people gathered acorns in the long rows
of oak trees at the base of Tahquitz Peak, silent

in their respect for the thunder, and visioned past
Pedro Chino, great shaman on the deer hunt who
transformed himself into a mountain lion so he

could reach the highest peaks more quickly from
the desert floor, the women sang songs at the oasis,
and they planted trees from the canyon. I know,

I felt the mountain lion stalking me, that late day
I'd climbed San Jacinto Peak, and no one, even you
could see me there, dusk whispering to me, and I

was scared, three miles to go and the trail waning
dark. And so I went away, sad, at your command,
for you knew you could not keep me there, the

lions leave pawprints in the snow, your thumbprints
chokeholded across my neck and spine. You broke
my cheek, and the people can only say that you

were not very nice to me, and so I went away. And
lucky for you, they remembered to pull your black
heart from the fire just before Coyote finished his

rabid feast, and you were saved, saved for them,
you look up at me and see a wan smile, a waxing
candle of light, barely enough to visit you, in my

roundabout way of coming and going, filling the
orbit of your mind in narrow ways, and full, the
sister you made and violated and sent away, slant

through your opaque window where you lie alone
at night, wanting me to fill your your hollow side,
your absent twin, I study you, I am shadow-fill.

copyright Ruth Nolan 2008