A phantom of clouds

As if it were the eve of July the fourteenth

Around four o’clock in the afternoon

I went down into the street to go see the acrobats

These people who do tricks outrdoors

Begin to be rare in Paris

In my youth you saw much more of them than today

They have nearly all gone to the provinces

I took Boulevard Saint-Germain

And in a little square located between Saint-Germain-

des-Prés and the statue of Danton

I came upon the acrobats

The crowd surrounded them silent and resigned to wait

I made a place in that circle so as to see everything

Formidable weights

Belgian towns lifted with outstretched arms by a

Russian workman from Longwy

Dumbbells black and hollow with for bar a rigid river

Fingers rolling a cigarette bitter and delicious as life

Numerous dirty carpets covered the ground

Carpets that have folds they’ll never get out

Carpets that are nearly every bit the color of dust

And where some green or yellow stains have persisted

Like an air of music that pursues you

You see the personage thin and savage

The ash of his fathers comes out of him in graying beard

He wore thus all his heredity in his face

He looked like he was dreaming of the future

While mechanically turning a Barbary organ

Whose slow voice lamented wonderfully

The glugglugs the goosenotes and the muted groanings

The acrobats didn’t budge

The eldest had a leotard the color of that mauvish pink

you find on the cheeks of certain young girls fresh

but close to death

That pink finds a niche above all in the folds that often

surround their mouth

Or beside the nostrils

It’s a pink full of treachery

On his back that man wore thus

The tint ignoble of his lungs

Arms arms everywhere mounted guard

The second acrobat

Was clad only in his shadow

I looked at him a long time

His face escapes me entirely

He’s a man without a head

Another in fine had the air of a ruffian

Of a thug good and scummy at once

With his baggy pants and his sock-garters

Didn’t he have the appearance of a pimp tarting up

The music fell silent and there were parleyings with the

public

Which sou by sou tossed on the carpet the sum of two

francs fifty

Instead of the three francs which the old man had fixed

as the price of tricks

But when it was clear that no-one would give any more

They decided to begin the show

From under the organ came out a very little acrobat

clothed in pulmonary pink

With fur at his wrists and ankles

He gave out brief cries

And bowed while spreading his forearms nicely

Hands open

One leg behind him ready for genuflection

He bowed thus to the four cardinal points

And when he walked upon a ball

His slim body became a music so delicate that none

among all the spectators was insensible of it

A little spirit without any humanity

Thought each one

And this music of forms

Destroyed that of the mechanical organ

Ground by the man with the face all covered with

ancestors

The little acrobat did cartwheels

With so much harmony

That the organ ceased to play

And the organist hid his face in his hands

With fingers resembling descendants of his destiny

Minuscule fœtuses that came out of his beard

New redskin cries

Angelic music of trees

Disappearance of the infant

The acrobats lifted the big dumbbells at arm’s length

They juggled with the weights

But each spectator sought the miraculous infant within

himself

Age o age of clouds

Guillaume Apollinaire