The Saint-Georges Renovations
I first mistook the men for squatters,
working amidst the yellow block party lighting;
the dust and their lack of face masks
with no sign of ventilation
lending me to believe that they were there
by mistake,
walking like the exiled from a war long gone.
And every time the train would skip,
going from Notre-Dame-de-Lorette
directly to Pigalle (for eleven months home),
it would slow down, like a trolley in a zoo,
wanting to ensure that we could find those
hard-to-spot creatures in their natural habitat,
to see them feeding, congregating, widening
an entryway, laying down new tiles.
They sealed off the arches with a playground fence,
annulling the aesthetic of white porcelain gaps,
this one of two hundred and fifty renovations
falling slightly short of its intended goal of
un métro plus clair, un métro plus beau –
One cannot blame the architects, though;
it cannot be their fault that that space was a
departure point for the residents of a city
which produced the first sociological analysis
of suicide to launch themselves with swiftness
onto the tracks and into subsequent statistical studies.
When the station re-opened, I still didn’t need it,
as my own stop was one away;
I did find it once, however, when lost
on a run aborted by my nicotine trends,
I came across the melted metal green,
blocks from my flat and months into my year,
acknowledged the consequence of
my lacking curiosity, and then ventured on,
striding, and gasping, before happening
upon a part of town that I had
been advised against entering.
