Call something "stone age" and you usually mean it is hopelessly out of date. Ernesto Priego opens "El molcajete" by turning the insult into a boast: "We come from the stone age: / the magic happens here." The molcajete is the volcanic-stone mortar used in Mexican kitchens to grind chillies, spices and salsa. The poem treats it as far more than a utensil. It is a source, a tool and an inheritance, and the whole poem is an argument that the oldest technology is still the most necessary.
The poem builds this argument by piling up names. "It is medicine, / nutrients, seed, / sauce" slides from the sacred and life-giving down to the everyday, and "sauce" lands alone, a small, comic drop that keeps the poem close to the kitchen. Then come single-word lines such as "cornerstone," each one set down like a block. "Sediment of history" borrows from geology, so time becomes layers packed into stone. In "the centre / holds," the line break makes us wait a beat before the verb arrives. Readers may hear an inverted echo of Yeats's famous line about the centre not holding, though the poem never says so. Here the centre is a heavy bowl on a countertop, and it holds.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The rhythm comes from short lines and white space, so the page looks like a small stack of stones. "Heavy / cold, totemic-" even ends on a dangling hyphen, as if the sentence were too weighty to finish neatly, before the plain claim "it is everything." The verbs in "make, serve, / be" move from what the molcajete does to what it is. The last word is the one that matters, because the poem suggests that being is the object's true function.
The middle of the poem turns to patience. Basalt is "broken in / before it works," so the tool is useless until it has been worked and tamed. Then Priego introduces two names, "Texolotl / and Molcaxitl," who "need each other." Judging by the words themselves, these look like the old Nahuatl names for the pestle and the mortar. Naming them lets an Indigenous language surface inside an English poem with a Spanish title, and the three languages together quietly enact the idea of descent. The pair also gives the poem its only picture of partnership, two objects incomplete alone. The refrain "We come from the stone age" returns here, now followed by "this is the tool." It circles back like the pestle going round the bowl.
Then the poem turns to "you." "Sooner or later you need to have one / you may have forgotten it is so essential." The tone is almost that of a gentle warning to a reader who has drifted from tradition. "You will carry its weight" works literally, since these stones are heavy, and also as a statement about responsibility. Whatever we inherit, we must bear.
The ending opens outward. "Those who came before us / joined the earth with theirs" is deliberately ambiguous. "Theirs" could mean their own molcajetes, their own bodies or their own stretch of earth, and the poem lets the stone and the ground merge. "Carved into it, / the cosmos" is just as fluid, since "it" could be the bowl or the earth. The final word, "indefinible," stands completely alone. After a poem that has defined its subject again and again, as medicine, seed, cornerstone and sediment, it admits that no list is enough.
That honesty is the poem's real significance. It takes an object most people would call ordinary and shows how much memory can be packed into it. It also practises what it preaches. Like the molcajete, the poem is compact, heavy for its size and capable of many uses, and it finishes by leaving something unexplained.