On-again, off-again: Gertrude and Alice in Paris

And Sir Francis Rose was a dud
bleeding what little genius he held
on the red carpet where the girls often spent
the night
stitching themselves to an ever smaller
less significant circle of friends:
those remaining few who had not yet disqualified
themselves by ringing an inner bell louder
than Gertrude's inner bell could be rung.
but she was a fancy washer woman toiling ceaselessly
cleaning the stains, flushing the drain with her own
interpretations until it was as fine a drain as could be found
in all of Paris by the mid-1920s.
once, she recognized genius.
but as time wore into her reputation, her threadbare dress stretched
over different angles, contemplating the fullness of the Earth.
She added legs as well as arms and a majestic nose, but couldn't
smell a friendship if it was in a separate place from where she sat.
once her secret, an orange flower fell to the floor like an old book
with many pages missing, and the spine was broken.