Poem for July

The Fired Schoolteacher

Three characters of proven banality accost each other with diverse poetical phrases (got a match, I beg of you, what time is it, how many leagues to the next town?), in an indifferent countryside and engage in a conversation whose echoes will never reach us. Before you is the twenty-acre field: I am its worker, its secret blood, its catastrophic stone. I leave you nothing to think.

translated by Paul Auster

Excerpt From Selected Poems of René Char
Rene Char (1907-1988)

Nothing to think, perhaps. But that very thought carries a force. To me this is a poem of the dead weights and old volcanoes at work in our lives.

IM