Summer Exhibition

All dawn-washed rectangles
The painting is a lawn
Look, even the liverworts have put on colours
Although, yes, they could be a myriad other things as well
Where have they sprung from?
How come in dreams our eyes still see?
Solemnity deposited like a sack of swampgas at the door,
Beauty takes time off to go skylarking
e.g. An Action Replay of a waiter’s race transfixed precariously for
  posterity in emerald porcelain
A pair of pimsolls the size of speedboats
Pre-Raphaelite postcards from Hove and Folkestone
This metal dragonfly
That bottled moon
A Ph.D. in Canines sculpted from a bite out of the encyclopedia
The All-Comers’ Latin American Dance Championship that on closer
  look becomes a work by Allen Jones
Morris Louis’s giant light-filled molars
Sails tinted with primeval landscapes
Some monumental smoke-rings from the palette of Frank Stella
Blue squares, white squares, grey squares, chevrons
A circle’s transcendent glare
Or is it just what I had for breakfast
This Catherine wheel which hangs so gently and makes no noise
A psychedelic nipple
O lunar dials and X-rays, sunsets depicted in a tent of flags
The painter has each fleck ordered like a hypnotist
Suddenly everything is windows, windows, windows
I the watcher gogglingly gullible
Now before me the sea’s focused into a turquoise pastel
In tiny zillions parks flash behind my eyes
And gratuitous as a slice of air
Birdsong gets the photo it has so long deserved
Even a car-axle proves it can be romantic
Beef-burgers wax lyrical
A tangerine make one laugh



Martin Bennett | Mudlark No. 12
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