Rita Dove - The Great Palaces of Versailles lyrics

Nothing nastier than a white person! She mutters as she irons alterations in the backroom of Charlotte's Dress Shoppe. The steam rising from a cranberry wool comes alive with perspiration and stale Evening of Paris. Swamp she born from, swamp she swallow, swamp she got to sink again. The iron shoves gently into a gusset, waits until the puckers bloom away. Beyond the curtain, the white girls are all wearing shoulder pads to make their faces delicate. That laugh would be Autumn, tossing her hair in imitation of Bacall. Beulah had read in the library how French ladies at court would tuck their fans in a sleeve and walk in the gardens for air. Swaying among lilies, lifting shy layers of silk, they dropped excrement as daintily as handkerchieves. Against all rules she had saved the lining from a botched coat to face last year's gray skirt. She knows whenever she lifts a knee she flashes crimson. That seems legitimate; but in the book she had read how the cavaliere amused themselves wearing powder and perfume and spraying yellow borders knee-high on the stucco of the Orangerie. A hanger clatters in the front of the shoppe. Beulah remembers how even Autumn could lean into a settee with her ankles crossed, sighing I need a man who'll protect me while smoking her cigarette down to the very end.