THE BRITTLE AGE and RETURNING UPLAND
René Char
Translated by Gustaf Sobin
$15.95, 5 x 7 1/2; 176 pgs.
ISBN 978-1933996-11-0

Marked Upon the Chasm

 In the chimerical wound of Vaucluse I watched you suffer. There, though lowered, you were a green water and also a route. You were crossing death in its disarray. Undulated flower of an incessant secret.

Slowness of the Future

 We must scale so much ice and dogma before running into good fortune, before waking in redness on the stone of the bed.

 For a long while there had been, between them and me, something like a wild hedge; we were free to pick and offer one another its flowering hawthorne. Never further than the hand and the arm. They loved me just as I loved them. But what wast his obstacle to the wind where my full strength failed? It was revealed to me by a nightingale and then, by carrion.

 Death within life is repugnant, irreconcilable; death with death, though, is approachable, it’s nothing: a frightened belly can crawl there without quivering.

 I have overthrown the last wall, the one that encircles the snow nomads, and I see--o my very first parents--the candlestick’s summer.

 Our figure on earth is only the second third of an incessant pursuit, a point, upland.