The Dome of Sunday

With focus sharp as Flemish-painted face

In film of varnish brightly fixed

And through a polished hand-lens deeply seen,

Sunday at noon through hyaline thin air

Sees down the street,

And in the camera of my eye depicts

Row-houses and row-lives:

Glass after glass, door after door the same,

Face after face the same, the same,

The brutal visibility the same;

As if one life emerging from one house

Would pause, a single image caught between

Two facing mirrors where vision multiplies

Beyond perspective,

A silent clatter in the high-speed eye

Spinning out photo-circulars of sight.

I see slip to the curb the long machines

Out of whose warm and windowed rooms pirouette

Shellacked with silk and light

The hard legs of our women.

Our women are one woman, dressed in black.

The carmine printed mouth

And cheeks as soft as muslin-glass belong

Outright to one dark dressy man,

Merely a swagger at her curvy side.

This is their visit to themselves:

All day from porch to porch they weave

A nonsense pattern through the even glare,

Stealing in surfaces

Cold vulgar glances at themselves.

And high up in the heated room all day

I wait behind the plate glass pane for one,

Hot as a voyeur for a glimpse of one,

The vision to blot out this woman’s sheen;

All day my sight records expensively

Row-houses and row-lives.

But nothing happens; no diagonal

With melting shadow falls across the curb:

Neither the blinded negress lurching through fatigue,

Nor exiles bleeding from their pores,

Nor that bright bomb slipped lightly from its rack

To splinter every silvered glass and crystal prism,

Witch-bowl and perfume bottle

And billion candle-power dressing-bulb,

No direct hit to smash the shatter-proof

And lodge at last the quivering needle

Clean in the eye of one who stands transfixed

In fascination of her brightness.

Copyright Credit: Karl Shapiro, “The Dome of Sunday” from Selected Poems (New York: Library of America, 2003). Copyright © 2003 by Estate of Karl Shapiro. Reprinted with the permission of Wieser & Elwell, Inc.

Source: Selected Poems (2003)