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 Contents | A Church in Florence