on the rue Boissy d'Anglas (1922 and beyond)

behind the black door,
Barbette in drag was a great laugh:
boys and girls
dining and drinking and dancing
the high and low
gens chic and gens louche
often broken lights and leading lights
a thick flood of cafe society
gorgeous young men and women
often free, others at a cost
pouring into Le Boeuf
like refugees from prohibition
and puritanism
with Picasso and Proust
(who would soon be dead),
arriving around eleven o'clock
with a drunken argument and their friends
in white tie and tails
or black like newspaper clippings
in a dinner jacket,
the men with ladies
in Chanel, Lanvin, or Vionnet

the ladies with ladies
watching Doucet, the house pianist,
make the rounds with his Corsican brandy and his keys,
past throngs of the beau monde
fashionably discrete he could hear them
whispering softly for their latest drug score,
or conversing with some unbelievable
pimps and queers before being turned out at 2,
when the bar closed to the Paris streets

and another day began.