The brief narratives that enliven Mario's writings on poetics provide a symbolic source for understanding the relationship between the conscious and unconscious processes that function during poetic creation. Mario privileges the image of the dock in two such narrative fragments in order to foreground the inevitable loss of meaning inherent in any process of transferal: a procedural loss of purity, experienced as the artist consciously and formally alters the lyric inspiration in the act of artistic expression, and an emotional loss of understanding that the artist may feel in relation to the public. The dock's consciousness-related symbolism richly expands in Mairio's contexts of (1) a poetics allegory referent to the El Dorado legend, and (2) a confessional hallucination born as much of intellectual fatigue as of the author's obsessive search for solidar-