Continuing my notes on Libro de barro.

XV "Amado objeto mío." There is an unnamed object, identified with the speaker, who turns inward in the second paragraph. Her pupils are stars that go on and off in the darkness. In the 14th and here in the 15th section of the sequence the speaker emerges more clearly and explores her own inner world, which before was projected unto a landscape.

XVI Two hands, one holding madness and storm, the other a "rigorous, mortal stone." So is there an alternative, a choice between these two hands? Next we find a spiderweb "secreting salvation over the abyss." In short, the metaphors become denser here, more charged. "Every center is a a mistaken road." The center contains nothingness and silence.

XVII A search for a sexless or virginal biological state, "without uterus or testicle, "an original and virginal beach."

XVIII The idea of salvation appears (first mentioned in XVI). Anything at all can be "the plank of salvation." But the speaker doesn't understand what salvation means, what it is for, when it will occur. It is "iron-hard nonsense."

We are near the end of the sequence now, with five poems remaining. No clear narrative has emerged, no intrinsic reason why one poem has to follow or precede another. There is coherence in the set of themes and motifs that has emerged, in the poetic language itself. There have been no false steps, aside from a few metaphors that are perhaps excessive in their hermeticism.

(to be continued)