The Death of Roland Barthes

Imagine the tableau:

Barthes, scarved and jacketed, listing

on a Paris side street after a long lunch with the Mitterrands,

absorbed by a wad of something

sucked from between his molars; here, the driver of the laundry truck

bored, dulled, sliding

into his seat to start the truck again.

It is cold: patches of ice

on the narrow street, the truck’s exhaust a white plume

billowing between the buildings.

He doesn’t see it, doesn’t hear its clatter (here

is that neutral, composite, oblique space

where our subject slips away, the negative

where all identity is lost) as it rounds the corner

onto the bricked street where he now stands remembering

the oaky tones of the wine served at lunch.

The driver must be looking somewhere

else as Barthes crosses the curb, first one foot, then

the other (the voice loses its origin, the author

enters into his own death) and the truck, as we say,

runs him down.

Compulsory death, death of the minor character,

death which we always saw coming: Barthes,

expiring at the curb like a pigeon. His white breath

mingles with the fumes of the truck’s exhaust, each a word

imitating the other.