Linneaus’ Flower Clock

by TOM CLARK

6 AM Spotted Cat’s-ear opens 7 AM African Marigold opens 8 AM Mouse-ear Hawkweed opens 9 AM Prickly Sow-thistle closes 10 AM Nippleworth closes 11 AM Star of Bethlehem opens 12 NOON Passion-flower opens 1 PM Childing Pink closes 1 PM Scarlet Pimpernel closes 3 PM Hawkbit closes 4 PM Small Bindweed closes 5 PM Water-lily closes 6 PM Evening Primrose opens

Linneaus leaned forward on his hands in a rhapsody of taxonomy outside the medical faculty hall at Uppsala University and knew the hour exactly simply by glancing down at the frail Moschatel or Town-Hall clock which bears at its stem tip five small flowers four encompassing its perimeter like the four faces of a clock the fifth pointing straight up at the sky habitation of a tidy clockmaker god on whose star circuits this whole vivid time garden was modeled

From “Fractured Karma” (Black Sparrow Press: $20 , cloth; 0-87685-792-6; $12.50, paper; 0-87685-791-8; 168 pp.). Clark is the author of many volumes of poetry as well as of two novels (including the recent “The Exile of Celine”) and several volumes of literary criticism. He is currently at work on a biography of American poet Charles Olson. copyright 1990, Tom Clark. Reprinted by permission of Black Sparrow Press.