The year begins in silence

Automati translation

 

 

 

 The year begins in silence, almost in sleep.

 

 

 

The circus, deserted, is not dead, it is resting. It sleeps, its head turned toward the dawn that hesitates behind the canvas.
A discreet reddening, between the two folds of the night’s curtain, a fire slumbers.
The first glimmer of January slides under the canvas like a timid hand brushing a sheet one dares not lift. The circus exhales a new breath: that of the newborn year. It advances gropingly through its own darkness, as a child explores the room where it has just been born. The curtains stretch, arch, crumple. The very fabric of the world awakens.

 

 

 

 

February arrives, a second heartbeat leaning against that first shiver. Cold mingles with fire, and from that gentle friction rises a first pleasure, fragile, almost secret. The circus is still closed, but at its center something radiates: a muffled desire, as if the year, before living, already wished to offer itself.
Then March rises, and the inner volcano,  that ancient heart forgotten beneath the planks, suddenly parts its rocky lips. An eruption surges, a jet of lava, a cry of earth piercing the sky.
Masts raised, ropes taut, the circus shivers through its whole wooden body. A moaning frame seized by a luminous spasm. A flash too intense to hide. The earth rises into the sky, and the sky descends into the earth. One enters the other in a gesture so profound that even the shaken curtains try in vain to hold back the secret. Fire, father of all things, plays at outplaying itself.

 

 

 

 April calms the blaze. It parts the canvas the way one opens a coat after a storm. Fine rains smooth the skin of the circus, like fingers gliding over a soothing wound. Everything becomes moist, supple, ready to receive. The ring exhales the smell of warm earth, of shy promises still folded in on themselves.
In May, the curtains breathe the open air. They swell, then hollow, and finally stretch like a torso filling with breath, offering its chest to the sun. The circus becomes a floral chamber.
Gold trembles in every straw. Every plank sighs. One enters this space as one would enter a ripe fruit being undressed.
June and July possess the gentle brutality of lovers without restraint. The sun strikes the canvas of the big top, which tightens, loosens, and gives back the heat. The ropes vibrate with contained desire. Circus shadows undulate like the hips of trees. In the air, smoke rises in sacred spirals, a diverted Milky Way… or perhaps a milky voice, an unspoken voice made from what bodies experience when they surrender.

 

 

 

 Then August, broad, massive, sovereign, takes the entire circus into its fiery embrace. The planks are scorching. The air trembles. The world seems to reach its apex, its paroxysm,
the point beyond which one cannot go without burning away.
And yet September already glides over the embers like a light sheet laid upon two bodies recovering their breath.
October barely lifts a curtain; a cool breath passes through. As the volcano’s shadow lengthens, the leaves fall like ribbons undone. The circus darkens, but without yet collapsing. It is an ending that refuses to end.
November lays a hand upon the naked wood, like a farewell. The ropes loosen. Something in us withdraws, not without tenderness. The bleachers groan softly, not from pain, but from a happy weariness. The year curls inward, gathering itself for its final metamorphosis.

 

 

 

And December is the last lover. It arrives in the heart of night, silently. Then it places a single hand upon the canvas. And the whole circus bends, bows, yields. The curtains fall, a long ballet, in a slow rustling, like garments slipping to the floor. The structure, panting, releases its tension; the smoke of the past rises in a starry spiral, ready to join the sky. The boundaries between days disappear. The old and the new take each other by the hand. The ending becomes a beginning. Birth and agony blur into a kiss. In the hollow where everything seems to unravel, a being is already rising. It carries the weight of twelve months, the perfume of four seasons, the voice of time itself. It is the sum of the world, virginal as on the first morning of the cosmos. One cannot tell whether it has just been born or has just returned. One cannot know whether it is future or past. In its mouth, time has no limit.
The new year opens its eyes. And the tent, folded like a body being embraced, opens again, gently, and changes once more, before fading away.