56.

I am not certain: je ne suis pas sûr

Qu’est-ce que la langue d’amour

Translations on the railway walls

Industrial scars or art, some rendez-vous,

La dolce vita gone awry after five

On a Friday night. The rail line cuts

Through Avignon where Petrarch cast about

For ways to change the way people talked

About love, perhaps even lived. Popes

Held court here when trains were fictions

And the Polish monk had not yet demoted

The earth. The red bauxite is

Lovers’ blood even as it transforms.