MAY DAY by Kim Mattson
Kim Mattson
May Day 1986
Everything on the outside is the same this morning. On the
outskirts of Kiev,
our farmland overturned, the cows’ mouths grinding in
silent motion.
Across the table, he stares: You must promise me. Lids
burdened
with a scientist’s insight. Around his mouth tight lines draw
willful fingers, instruct,
forget what you know, forbid
everything he has told me.
Atomic lesion. For days, a white-hot graphite fire
unquenchable, swelling: black clouds
churning epidemic. When will they tell the people? Words
are husks, vomit.
Even here, hours from the explosion, nausea. My thoughts
turning
to visions of babies with limbs knotted, eyes sealed shut.
Could I somehow betray him?
Nothing remains now, is mine. What I say folds over itself
like water in a cistern.
Curtains drawn. A clear film scrubbed from our lashes,
our fingernails.
Eyes hollow, he turns from the television
while behind
him in Red Square
crowds cheer as Gorbachev steps to the platform: celebration
of spring
and the worker—the scientist: locked in obligation. I turn
down the lamp.
Wrapped in our quilt, layers and folds of warmth …
the windows haze
as chalky voices grow nearer. Soon uniforms and fists raised
to the door will take him
from sleep, in the way of Sakharov and Gensen, and I will
go with him.
Morning rises purple, in secret. Everywhere it leaks
into day and I have forgotten everything. The air is blue:
stalks of poison.
