Love in Cincinnati

In comfort, soot and snow lose each their rigors.
Our backdrop fits Bohème, but we are burghers,

And through our window, in that moving stipple,
Go past the figures of the not quite people:

Intermittent, partial, pointillistic
No more a likeness than if we, bold, plastic,

Entire, unmade them by our mere example;
Than if our bodies (counting-house, not temple)

Housed yet a spirit they, for all their motion,
Cannot warm. Who treasures inhibition,

Here, may find it, in its late expressions,
Unearned income that supports the passions;

Find also, laying-by whatever wounded,
How middle age returns it all compounded.

Accruing time, of what unlikely mortar,
Has built us thus a burgess Latin Quarter;

Of red brick rectitude and iron repression
Improvised this gaslit indiscretion;

And placed about us, linked to love’s warm center,
The populated streets we now must enter.