Two Poems:

Louis Slotin Assembles the Plutonium
Implosion Core for the Trinity Test, July 1945

At first, the actual assembly was about
as riveting as watching someone bake
a birthday cake or write a book. I did
the whole thing sitting down. And yet
the smallest details of the scene
seem luminous in memory. The tabletop
was masked with long brown sheets of butcher paper
strewn with the gadget's odds and ends.
They gleamed like gold- and nickel-plated
grapefruit halves. It felt as though I moved
in thickened light. Each gesture slow, precise,
painstaking, and intense.
My focus narrowed to the metal parts
arrayed before me. One by one,
I moved them into place. A small sphere
of beryllium was first, cupped like an egg
between two hemispheres of hollowed-out
plutonium, womb-shaped, as warm as flesh
from random fissions. Then the curved leaves of
plum-colored tamper. Each part knew its place.
Between my hands, I felt a world take shape.
The Geiger counter clicked. My palms grew slick.
I felt my fingers slowly growing numb,
gripping the heavy chunks, more dense than gold.
I shifted my grip abruptly.
Everybody jumped. My back ached.
Were my fingers freezing or on fire?
I tried to blink away the sparks
from my exhausted retinas. I leaned
close to the sphere, but suddenly it shrank
to a speck far out of reach. Or had it swelled
to planet size? Huge, jagged mountains thrust
toward me, and yet so small it seemed
a single pinpoint stabbed my fingertips.
I felt myself begin to fall. I closed
my eyes. My stomach lurched.
The taste of rotten lemons stained my tongue.
Surely, somehow, the core went critical.
A blue glow filled the air: The radiation
ionized the aqueous humor of my eyes.
Now I would die.
                            Then Serber spoke. "Louis,
are you all right?" He touched my shoulder. My eyes
were wet. I opened them. In my clenched hands
was the completed core. It seemed that I
was not among the ones about to die.

Kitty Oppenheimer Tends Louis Slotin
after an Accident in the Lab

I hadn't seen Hiroshima myself,
or Nagasaki, though I'd heard Bob Serber's
stories. They seemed like fairy tales or myths —
fables to frighten children, or at best
efforts to cast the inexplicable
in human terms. But then I tended Slotin
his last nine days and saw. Saw him vomit
till his stomach bled. Saw him try to grip
the white enamel bowl in the crotches of his thumbs,
his hands so swollen that his fingers wouldn't bend.
Saw him retch clear strands of spit, green flecks
of bile, too tired to wipe them from his lips.
He hiccuped for ten hours straight. At first
he almost laughed; later we strapped him down
to stop him clawing at his diaphragm.
Blisters grew like toadstools on his hands,
between his fingers, up his arms. The skin
peeled off his chest. His hair came out in clumps.
His liver failed. His kidneys. Bowels blocked.
Blood filled the bedpans. We gave him codeine.
Morphine. Nothing helped. Pain paced his body.
His fingers and his toes turned blue. His face
bloated, blistered, thick as a mask. A rind.
He seemed unconscious — so we had to think.
He might have been a thousand different men.
A hundred thousand. Only, when he died,
no cities burned. Friends grieved. His parents took
a lead-lined coffin back to Winnipeg.

John Canaday
The Cincinnati Review
Volume 2, Number 2
Winter 2005

Copyright © 2005 by The Cincinnati Review
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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