Hanged Man’s Ball    

(Bal des pendus – written in 1870)

At the black gibbet, marionettes amiable
Dance, dancing the Paladins,
The devil’s lean hounds the Paladins,
The bouncing skeletons of the Saladins.

They dance, Sir Beelzebub slaps their heads
They grimace and dance by the jerking
Of a little black tie against the sky
And a smack on their foreheads this Christmas!

Then the puppets, shocked, fuse their spindle arms
Like layered organ pipes—black, bound above;
The chests are open. What used to be pressed 
To damsels clean, collides in hideous love,

The thrusting of sweaty congress disemboweled!
Lithe women writhe and swing on the hangman’s beam!
Is this love or is this confusion?… pay nothing of a mind—
Beelzebub boiling rasps bow over viola hissing in time!

My heels are hard, not in need of replacing.
My chest and legs have peeled off suits of skin.
I am naked.  There’s nothing shocking left to see Maman.
Atop my  skull a cap of mountain snow:

Crows make crowns royal, cracked—
The pink, bleeding flesh quivering at their beaks
Caught in twilight’s dawn of nocturnal winds.
At these, knights of putrescent paper armor present.

The breezes blow through the hanged men arranged
Like ferrous organ pipes, a rusty squeezebox,
And wolves go answering from the violet forests,
From a horizon, hellish and red and moaning…

Shake off and unstring these stony captains 
Who, make a holy pass, reading rosaries of love!
Their broken fingers number pale vertebrae:
There is no sanctuary, for you, dead forever!

Oh! There in the midst of the dance macabre, 
One mad skeleton, untrammeled wild to gallop
Gone, carried by whips, a stallion:
Still feeling the strangling reins around his neck,

His forefingers clutch at his bony thigh,
Giggles squeezed out of the chalk more than moans,
And, like a wanderer entering the walls of the town,
To applause he bounces the ball to the song of the bones.

At the black gibbet, marionettes amiable
Dance, dancing the Paladins,
The devil’s lean hounds the Paladins,
The bouncing skeletons of the Saladins.

Author: Arthur Rimbaud
Translator: Manny Grimaldi