Martin Bennett: ‘Dandelions’, ‘Home Economics’, ‘Listening to Willis Conover’ and ‘So much to take in’

Dandelions

Here’s looking at you,
they appear to say
peering over and out
from behind the grey
cistern on the seventh
floor. Easter Day
and, yes, we too
have made it through
the winter. Take a leaf
from James Schuyler’s
book and pencil us
a skinny shimmy,
what in the streets beneath
is better-known as a poem—
one of those that just
drop from the blue
up then into whose
vast baldness
our grizzly old clocks
launch tiny hair after
regenerative hair

Martin Bennett

Home Economics

Counting down from blocked bancomat
to rent day, ambushing plain pluses
with minus, never getting their arithmetic
quite correct, the ghouls of money flit
round his bed all night, an orbit
that won’t let be. Now each side-walk
looms closer, they harry his route
to work; in a murk of digits
slap-up dinner and that rash evening
at the opera turn against him.
Prompt-eyed Alimony dispenses
its inflated penny’s worth. Time to stir in
a shaky exchange rate: Squinting black,
red, black, the sum restarts from scratch.

Martin Bennett

Listening to Willis Conover, Cape Coast, 1980

Round midnight upon a hill in Ghana,
Atlantic twinkling a couple of valleys
Below, in syncopated New Yorkese
His voice rolls deep and slow. “Time … for … Jazz.”—
From Poland, Czechoslovakia, Chicago …
Once Paul Horn asquat in the Taj Mahal:
Its muezzin at the sight of his flute
Took umbrage, “But I sing my songs to God.”
“And I play my flute to God.” There ensued—
Moonbeams’ adjunct—a duet. Jihad
And Crusade throw down their arms in wonder.
Twinned arpeggios telescope time and space;
Amphion’s spell rewound from high to low—
Underground, a seismic decade away
Berlin’s Wall begins to quake …

Martin Bennett

“So much to take in”
i.m. Martin Harrison, 1949–2014,
England-Australia-Rome

Via their pre-set diagonals
train and jet-plane exchange rattle
with roar. The DIY fanatic next-door
is our Ginger Baker or Keith Moon
now, hooting its departure for Milan,
la Freccia Rossa, long as many a street,
joins in on horns. “Goodies versus villain,”
sirens squad-car beading distant flyover.
Ostia’s choristers, gulls gusted down-Tiber
mew their bit. Like some megasonic ninja,
helicopter beats up adjacent air-
space, then shrinks into one more twitter.

Courtesy of top-floor sensurround
such acrobatic statuary, underwear
and T-shirts’ floppy hieroglyphics.
“Tutta Roma’” grandstanding prepositions,
Caput Mundi basks, twinkles, flickers.
Comings, goings. Swing and glide and drift.
Lift or climb: As far as rent permits,
without needing to shift an inch, I sit—
slight Cortes of my landlord’s terrace,
a peak in Darien’s snug surrogate,
chair negotiating shine and shade,
districts encompassed in a single blink.

Apprised by internet that you’ve since passed on
into the blue beyond, my own side
of the antipodes, one Martin
to another, I offer this: How in
carbon cursive across the sunset
chimney smoke has doodled who knows what,
red-white crane replicates an Alex Calder.
Rolling back the decades, I recall
your then preference for Frank O’Hara
over Ted Hughes’s primordial strife,
for cadences more relaxed yet in your case
per every minutia as precise.

Belated tribute to a friend lost trace
of yet never really absent merges
with “twilight’s happenings”, “underswell,
pressure, pulse”, “the glimmerings of things”.
“Chitter-chatter”, again to echo a phrase,
acoustics—your pigeon—prompting imagery,
like Larkin’s squeal of brakes becoming
arrow-fall becoming rain. “Humanness
itself flowering light”, where you remain.
“A balance quivers in mid-air, settles.”
Your last collection, all of a sudden
unfinished, was titled “Happiness”:

Already some of it is being passed on …

Martin Bennett