26
You force yourself to say your truth, to maintain a certain “faithfulness to experience,” but I tend toward the position that you can’t write about everything that’s happening. And at the same time I want to say something. I live in the world of the infancy of my son, in a year without language. “Use your body” doesn’t do justice to this state, which is to make myself solid when it’s necessary and afterwards soft and afterwards to liquify, to conjure new things from my body that seem spent, to run against the limit, to squeeze out just a little bit more.
47
Sometimes I think becoming a mother destroyed me. Nothing, that.
53
Sometimes enchantment and disenchantment are so closely tied together and they can be separated by the blink of an eye. Sometimes I’m so tired that depression starts to climb up from my feet like a creeping plant—it’s poisonous. I think sleeping badly can really ruin you and this makes you think about what character is made of. Sometimes this happens and afterwards, I blink, my son comes at me and he tugs at my pants, raises his head and smiles – the spell breaks so quickly and it occurs to me that we’re in paradise. Paradises must always be like this, conceived of in the moment you find them or lose them.
58
I want new poems, I want new poems, I want everything to be new because it already is.
59
The heat returns, and we go back to opening the windows. I really like this, the same air circulating from one place to the next, the sky right there in your hands. The windows open and the door closed, but the door also opening all the time more frequently. I’m making our living room in the plaza, a place where you can sleep or think or eat. I’d like to go out barefoot and without a bra, in long dresses. I dream about having clothes that I can use inside and out, dresses with pockets to carry the little that I need, just grabbing the keys and walking out the door.
61
The little plaza closest to our house has the highway on one side, Avenida San Juan on the other. From anywhere you sit you’ll see cars passing, a line of cars and trucks and buses that make lots of noise, we got a very complicated plaza, if you look at the traffic you have the sensation that you should just wait a short while and it’s going to pass but it’s not true, it’s not going to pass ever. We’re surrounded and all the cars are grey and they’re like shark fins and the city is an ocean.
63
Dreams of purity are everywhere.
64
This is a poem for all the mothers who are tired, so that you know that I’ve thought a lot about all of you this year. I’m alone and lost – I ask myself if each one of you is also alone and lost. Do you sometimes get the feeling that you’re never going to be able to rest? But no, we’re going to rest, old age is a beautiful promise.
67
Why did I get out of the water? It was a mistake! I close my eyes, I remember the calm of the water, I think I never should have gotten out.
68
Like a crazy person.
71
Less control and more craziness, mommy!
Like before!
72
An idea grows in the heart like a plant with thorns.
76
Tap, tap
on the stairs
tap, tap! when he finally discovers
what’s on the other side of the door
