(after a painting by the Surrealist artist Eileen Agar)

Here, an atomic clock blooms chronons.
Nuclear pistils strike and quiver at the hour.
The bright petals of minutes enfold me.

A Cesium fountain spouts an arc of atoms
resonating with distant stars
that spread like weeds.

A sundial, growing profusely in the shade,
cross-pollinates a digital clock's electric blue numbers.
A nanosecond flowers into eternity.

Green horological splicings
oscillate hybrid pendulums.
Greenwich Mean Time droops on the vine.

Dinosaur seedlings sprout into
paleontologic remnants of the future.
A fossil-plant turns its bony head from the moon
to watch us extinct.

Lorraine Schein is a New York poet and writer whose work has appeared recently in Gargoyle, Space and Time, Full Unit Hookup, and 2001: A SF Poetry Anthology. Her work will be included in the anthologies Angel Body and Other Magic for the Soul (Wordcraft of Oregon) and Mondo Alice. Her novelette, "The Raw Brunettes," is also available from Wordcraft.