TERRAIN,three

TERRAIN, three
(photographs and haiku)

Surrogate
What was once a fallen blossom
is now its own replica
carved in walnut

Vegetal Space*
I’ve seen Gauguin heading
for these shrouded steps
Teshigahara too, dressed in green
*French art critic Pierre Restany uses this phrase
in a text about Hiroshi Teshigahara’s elaborate tea ceremony
in the garden of the UNESCO building in Paris in 1992.

Sluiceway
a torrent flowing in a dead log
despair is a cataract
falling out across the grass

La Ronde
If you hold on tight
the world will move
and you will feel still

Artifice
The lake glistens like a sheet of glass
A sheet of glass gleams like a quiet lake
A plant is a tree or a tree is a plant

The Shadow Knows
Shadows are knife-edged
and spiked hard like sea anemones,
unraveling every adjacency

Nothing Moves
The site of something unnameable
builds fear in its first responders
nothing moves without its pain

Unstill Life
Vegetables on their own (these are onions)
shaking with energy, blooming from within*
must be curtailed by bowls.
* “blooming from within” is Philostratus, “Imagines”
(cited by Norman Bryson in his Looking at the Overlooked
(Harvard U. Press,1990), p.19.

Second Choice
A cat can understand your reading
but only if you have absolutely
nothing nothing NOTHING to do instead.

A Claw
It’s a far cry
from all trees being
created equal

Seed Bed
Ah Sun-flower! weary of rhyme.
There’s too much poetry lashed to one blossom
It needs vigor, like being a trampoline

Portal
You can search the world over
(like Marco Polo) for an honest landscape
and find it at last, projected from within

A Whiter Shade of Pale
Roses too leave fossils behind.
When their wet perfume is finished
they lie back in paper bones

Nemo
Things I’ll never know
churn across the bottom of the sea
The same creatures lurch through space

A Rictus Smile
Fear of the gaping, metonymic mouth:
lips like sleepers, tombstone teeth.
a cold wind blows from it

Four Legs Good
It was Oedipus who correctly solved
the Sphinx’s fatal riddle,* causing her to kill herself.
Me, I’d have passed on the whole thing.
*The Riddle: What has one voice but goes on four legs in the morning,
two in the afternoon, and three in the evening? The answer: a human
being, who crawls as a baby, stands on two legs as an adult, and walks
with a stick in old age.

Guardian
An insolent barricade!
The sneering of its wire mesh
defends the baby bricks behind it.

Aspire
Plants like voices clambering up,
Why does nothing ever clamber down?
Up is hope and our hopes are infinitely touching.

Unkind Cut
Formless, intangible, without beginning.
without end is the Self*
yet death snips it like garden shears
* “The King of Death” (Katha) in The Upanishads

Accursed
Have I a body or have I none? *
A question as empty
as bad nails badly pounded
* Han Shan, Cold Mountain, # 96.

Prankster
A senior tree, mischievous
in its retirement, blocks the sun
no matter where the sun goes

Eternal Return
Ouroboros, the circular serpent,
is the mad configuration of our time.
Our digitalized infinity is now a dirigible.

Fascinating Fascism*
Take a normal, pliable tree.
Having overpowered a neighbouring tree
it suddenly grows pricks, teeth and armour plating
* The title of an essay by Susan Sontag about Nazi filmmaker Leni
Riefenstahl, first published in The New York Review of Books on February 5,
1975.

Index
If there were any doubt
the winds were gathering
look to the grasses for corroboration

Little About Eve
This is a portrait of Eve
in a dry corner of Eden
living in the downfall of her hair

Tyranny Rex
Two dark empowered logs
monitor a ruckus of small-cut slices
cordoned up the hill. The play is starting.

Branch Line
Dark branches darken further
when they pass a field of light
Me? I long for a pointless moon

Mind the Gap
A fence continues until it stops.
Is the resulting pause a courtesy
to the traveller or weakness in the system?

Somebody Else’s Childhood
a brute wall, a sad driveway,
a desolate garage, irredeemable
by a flare of sunlight

Ex-Cathedra
Our Lady of Stems and Branches,
of singing leaves, of vegetal arches
and vaults, pray for us!

Underkill
sometimes we fell more
than we can hue
inertia is mightier than the axe

Lighthouse
a bright new building
born like us from darkness
transcending its elemental past

Infomotion
this hi-caloric picture van
super-saturated with photos
is likely to melt under its meanings

Hideaway
the soft view from beneath a tree
out onto the green sward
nobody needs to know I’m here!

Eternal Return
two saplings tried and failed
hundreds of seeds
await their chance

Eve’s Atom
a new kind of plant
springs up in Eden
one with spars, angles and sockets

The Grass is Singing*
the voluptuousness of grasses
not to be cut or trimmed or mown
but left to follow where the sun leads them
* title of a 1950 novel by Doris Lessing

A Circularity
The Hospitable Planet Maple
with its carpentered rings
orbiting the mother trunk

In Absentia
two have left the garden
one may come back
but I fear the other has gone for good

Elusive
the most beautiful plants
stand geographically green
at the unexplorable edges of longing

Vanitas
Narcissus’ leggy water plants
bend over his amplifying mirror
hoping it will give them the same comfort

Glasswear
A stretch of glass where light
held fast has come to cracks.
Flowers inching forward

Debutante
shot from a cannon of ancient knowing wood
this tentacled probe,
eager to learn the gasps of space

One-Sided Politics
A mature, left-leaning tree
in a progressive forest!
Just don’t look at it from the other side

Bough to the Inevitable
Adam builds his hut in Paradise
raising high the roofbeam
like the whale’s spine he remembered

Anomaly
two marbled planets sidle up
closing the gap
when the cosmic glue dries out

Soliloquy
a solitary shadow-actor
struts darkly against
its supporting roots and feelers

Glut
Things may be in the saddle and riding mankind*
but in America Deserta, indeterminate objects
can be ice water refreshing
* See Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Ode, Inscribed to William
H. Channing” (1846).

Falling Leaves
plants get sick too
mostly we ignore their distress
in this reverse hothouse they get green care

Sheltering Fig
Their Bodhi tree lost its leaves
and almost died. Now it’s coming back, sensing
Siddhartha’s return to its nourishing shade

Lee Ka-sing 李 家 昇
Ka-sing grew up in Hong Kong and lives in Toronto, Canada since 1997. He
was the co-founder of DISLOCATION (1992, with Lau Ching-ping and Holly Lee).
In 1995, Ka-sing and Holly founded OP Print Program, covering a cross-section,
with original prints produced by Hong Kong contemporary photographers in
the nineties. Lee Ka-sing was awarded “Artist of the Year” (1989) by Hong Kong
Artists’ Guild, and the Fellowship for Artistic Development (1999) presented by
Hong Kong Arts Development Council. Selected monographs include “Thirty-one
Photographs” (1993, Photo Art), “Forty Poems, photographs 1995-98” (1998,
Ocean & Pounds, Hong Kong Arts Development Council Publication Grant),
“The Language of Fruits and Vegetables” (2004, Hong Kong Heritage Museum),
“De ci de là des choses” (2006, Editions You-Feng). “Time Machine” (2021, with
haiku by Gary Michael Dault). Recent sequential photo work released in book
form: ”CODA” (2020), “Diary of a Sunflower Book Two” (2022), “Songs from
the Acid-free Paper Box” (2022) and others. Lee Ka-sing’s work is in private
and public collections, and in museums such as Tokyo Metropolitan Museum
of Photography, M+ Museum, Hong Kong Heritage Museum and Hong Kong
University of Science and Technology.
Gary Mihael Dault
Having spent most of his professional life in Toronto, as a painter, university
teacher and art critic (his visual arts column, Gallery-Going, ran in The Globe
& Mail for fourteen years, a sojourn he now regards as essentially purgatorial),
Gary Michael Dault lives with his wife, artist Malgorzata Wolak Dault and
their seven cats, in a greatly cherished Victorian house (called Swan House
because of the stained-glass swans bedecking it) in the town of Napanee in
Eastern Ontario. Dault is the author of numerous magazine articles and gallery
catalogues, as well as a dozen books about the visual arts. He has published
ten volumes of poetry, and has written three television documentaries, all for
the late Sir Peter Ustinov (the most ambitious of which was a 6-hour miniseries
titled Peter Ustinov: Inside the Vatican). Dault has exhibited his own paintings
many times, most recently at Verb Gallery in Kingston, Ontario. He has been
contributing regularly to the online Monday ARTPOST for over a decade.