Badger Running Off at the Mouth
There are no Siamese twins in this
Town, no albinos; only soccer
matches, bourbon, steaming horses
and the slick skirts of afterbirth hanging
from hind-ends. I don’t care how
depressed you are, I’m not coming
to your party. Champagne
and sodomy are overrated—in that
order. Smoking in the shower, with a bacon
sandwich and a boy named Daniel waiting
on the sink, on the other hand, are
supremely underrated. I admit,
I’m an unnecessarily handsome
knockabout, nightly drunk to no apparent
effect. But, it’s nice to be worried about.
It’s almost like being cared about.
Condensation Cube*
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
of worn-out worms, 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
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.
*After David Alworth’s “Bombsite Specificity”
Father Benides
Father Benides touched me in my special
place when I was eight. Then he put
his little man—like the neck of a goose
tethered to a telephone pole—to my forehead.
Families locked away in their houses—
drained swimming pools, deserted
runways, the flooded river. Everyone
is the way they are. I think
I laughed—as if I knew where I was
going, as if my shadow jogged on
before me. It’s not well to laugh
at another man’s misfortune. Father
Benides only smoothed my hair—I stared
at the chips in the ceiling. My conscience
is clear as regards having done
my duty. It’s his anger I envy most
today; his anger and his directness.
Adam Day was awarded the 2011 PEN Emerging Writers Award for Poetry.