Stubborn mountain,
rock anchor,
            you grew from cuentos carried at night
in the wind’s dry hands,
            seed pebbles
that became your wide-hipped,
unmovable contours, curves
where finches and secretive
            spiders nest.

            Poet of ancient seas
and baritone fossils,
            of trilobites and cephalopods,
lyric cantadora of horn corals,
            ammonites and crinoids,

            impatient, gray historian
lured by the whir of a pen,

            its tip, a top whirring,
dancing on the page,
            you write until your fingers cramp
and your shoulders knot,
            weary at the echoes of grief
still moist beneath the boulders
of prejudice.

—From “Ode to El Paso” in Adobe Odes