Science  Write  Now

Timeflower, unwound by the bone-dry day
& crazed with bees, petals wilt themselves shut.
Skins turn limp/wild/mad/chic/lush/soft/phat/sweet.
Inside now a tangle of teeth & tongues,
a little sculpture garden in the mouth—
small yellow pebbles & chicken-bone jade,
plinths, obelisks, fresh tell-tale signs of death.
Come morning, ten o’clock will mean nothing
& the garden won’t tell what time it is
& nobody will know when to take tea.
Just as cotyledon has become leaf,
there’s the holy sacrament of the seed
punctuated with a single comma—
embryo, like the very end of thought.

Seeding? Take a child’s simple stem cell,
plant it under the skin of a kidney
where the little lab mouse might grow a tooth,
a pyramid, & a small secret thought, 
as if upon passing through a mother
again & again, change a tiny bit.
Wind it back. We’ll just replace all the parts
so that there isn’t so much a dying
as a fall to the bottom of the jar
& return to a previous life stage.
What if you went up to a space station
& came back down not quite in the same state,
or just if we all shared the same toothbrush
& discover no-one dies after all?

The artist (1) says all sculpture is oral – 
for history to utter anything, 
air has to pass through teeth, by onyx rake
& tap shoe, marking time to start afresh.
On paper sits a reimagining –
the toothy smile of a furry spider (2)
carries new theories of evolution.
For accidental ingestion of thought
as foreign body, a glass of water
or mother’s milk, for an artist (3) to glue
baby teeth onto clear crystal resin –
a watering of teeth, or water teething?
We shuffle such questions in our cupped hands
set them rolling on the table like dice.

1 Irena Haiduk, ‘Spells’
2 Odilon Redon, ‘The Smiling Spider’
3 Gina Czarnecki, ‘Palaces’