Condensation Cube

128 The best way to visit Kelvedon Hatch bomb shelter is in the new Alfa-Romeo; with its four-wheel disc brakes, luxurious interior and road-holding ability, it’s safe, fast and pleasant to drive. Just follow the sign: “Secret Nuclear Bunker.” Sixties-era mannequins in Burberry with moving legs and breasts, loitering in corridors. A skinny husband in the craw of a cold bed with a snore like a toothache. Tranquil tensions escalated. With striptease the décor is always more important than the person disrobing. Whatever chaos reigns above—fallow fields the ponds cowering—life underground is snappy, ordered, austere. A zone of leisure. How war can be productive; constellating Nixon in the kitchen, celebrating appliances and amenities. Baked beans, tomato juice, Nescafé, a rational level of dread. Outside, night’s cold, object’s cold; no different from a church. Condensation on Plexiglas. Descending from a slope of debris, children swarm the ruins. False-feathered cardinals for floral arrangements, pressed & colored glassware, garden tools. Typhoid from seashells cleaned improperly. How stupid and forgettable adults are. To conceive of the world as a target. Like a cantilevered goldfish. To vie for spots in the only shelter ADAM DAY CONDENSATION CUBE After David Alworth’s “Bombsite Specificity” 129 in the neighborhood. Nowhere else to go but another part of the airplane. To photograph ourselves as humans; to see ourselves as bullets and bombs see us. Children embroidered in a rug like musical instruments abandoned in a field. Seeing all the different moments, the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains; like soldiers looting a clock factory. Participant-observers; innocent nobodies. The incompleteness of the past; the ongoingness of history. Dogs eating grass beneath the dripping trees; the smell of a white dress rained on. It is a country which you can imagine, for it is pretty like a picture, as it lies there amidst its landscape, like an artisanal snow globe, which it owns. ...