Continuing from the day before my notes on Blanca Varela's Libro de barro.

IX. The Gamoneda convergence becomes even more marked: "¿Qué dice ese cuerpo inmóvil en su movimiento?" Or "I say isle and think see I say sea and think isle." A dialectic between mobility and stillness, isle and sea, plenitude and emptiness. This is the shortest poem in the sequence so far, the most cryptic and intense.

X. Another very short text. "Infinite isles in an interior sea." An attempt to recapture lost time in the presence of death.

XI. "Wear decrepitude like a flower or crown." We should envy Autumn and Winter, embrace snow and silence. There is wisdom in an "absence of shadow," perhaps due to an absence of light?

XII. An attempt to define poetry itself, as the "silent hubbub of the heart." Poems are "objects of death." Poetry is compared to bodily fluids, urine and blood.

XIII. "Pain between two walls is no longer pain." The body seems separated from itself, somehow, a foreign object: "zona inexplorada de la carne íntima" [unexplored zone of intimate flesh].

XIV. Here we return to theme of god, who is also alien to himself, sitting at his own right hand. The speaker has created him in her own image. She identifies herself as a woman for the first time in the sequence: "A poor woman with sad hair who takes evil off herself by the fistfuls and washes herself a thousand times and is herself the indelible mark on the blade of the knife." The word for blade here (hoja) also means leaf and page of paper (hoja de papel.)

(to be continued.)