Ode to El Paso

            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,

         ...