Remember pay phone booths? Poet Elizabeth Hellstern does. She's the inventor of the Telepoem Booth - a vintage rotary phone booth that recites poetry to you when you dial a number from the poem directory. Hellstern debuted the booth a couple of years ago in Flagstaff, but has since moved it to the high desert of northern New Mexico where she's lived off-grid for the last year. Today, Hellstern brings us the latest installment of our series Poetry Friday...Telepoem-style.
High Desert, by Elizabeth Hellstern
I have lived for a year in the High Desert
and have observed this:
The land is dust-dry
the cacti grab at my skin, needy,
hoping someone will love them
Their fuchsia-bloom is beautiful
The fly pupae rise in spring
Irritating, maybe
but alive. For such a very short time
The land has new buildings scattered
The bulldozed branches are piled on the side
of the human tracks that mar the desert
Every day an exquisite sunset,
the sun's requisite farewell
to the harsh of Ortiz Mountains
The night then
pulls the clouds in
the lightest of eiderdowns
Raven circle in blue
Desert life is true and slow
there's no room for waste
Its beauty is spare
and unexpected. Death
is always here--a constant guest
This desert has flogged me,
whipped me
cracked me over its knee
Like the snag piñon tree
Only to cast me aside
my wood bleached to silver
The wind is my mirror
a reflection of constant change
I am split open to the sky
In the stone circle above the arroyo bed
I spiral like a pendulum
regulate the energy's clock mechanism
Raise my vigor and directly address
the gods and the fae
Make offerings and ask for their aid
I seek the rain and then the chalice
And bowls of ancestral pottery spill
like lucid dreams from the pillow
Peel away the bark
eat the surface, like a twisting beetle track
Oh land, may you accept me yet
