TERRAIN,six

TERRAIN, six
(photographs and haiku)

TERRAIN, six

photographs by Lee Ka-sing
haiku by Gary Michael Dault
(a collaboration)

TERRAIN, six
Photographs: Lee Ka-sing
Haiku: Gary Michael Dault
First published in Canada by OCEAN POUNDS
January, 2024
Hardcover edition
ISBN: 978-1-989845-82-0
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in
Publication
Photography, Poetry
Title -
TERRAIN, six
Authors -
Lee Ka-sing, Gary Michael Dault
Copyright ©2024 OCEAN POUNDS
Individual Copyrights belongs to the Artist
All Rights Reserved
For information about permission
to reproduce selections from this book,
write to mail@oceanpounds.com
This is the sixth volume of TERRAIN,
an ongoing collaboration between two artists,
featuring Ka-sing’s photographs and
Gary’s haiku in response. The diptychs in this
volume have been published daily on
oceanpounds.com starting from
December 10, 2023 to January 28, 2024.
Design by DOUBLE DOUBLE studio
Published by OCEAN POUNDS
50 Gladstone Avenue, Toronto,
Ontario, Canada M6J 3K6
www.oceanpounds.com

Drawn from Nature
“O wind that sings
so loud a song!” *
And draws what it sings!
* “The Wind” by Robert Louis Stevenson, from
A Child’s Garden of Verses, 1885.

The Compleat Angler*
A prow: the preview of possibility
A peak: the sad end-stopping
of ambition
* This is the title of a famous book about fishing (or angling)
by English writer Izaak Walton, published in 1643. But I am
interested here in the word “angling” not as a reference to
fishing, but as an exploration of geometric angles.

Splendour in the Grass
Débutante grasses en pointe,
flickering like weak flames,
the gossips of doomed elegance.

Unidentified Flying Obsequy
This bright necklace of galactic blessing,
a rosary
in contrite space

Stare Case
How beautiful
the startled, upstart eyes
breaking away!

The Road of Excess leads to the
Palace of Wisdom.*
Excess is more vivid than astringency.
I like a horse running through
whatever I do
*William Blake, “The Proverbs of Hell” in
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1793.

Voltaire’s Vortex*
radiating circles, bulls-eye or burner,
drain for sacrificing blooms
their papery leaves
*After Voltaitre’s adage that “God is a circle whose
centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere/”

Go Fly a Kite
Aerial dreaming, near the window,
wanting to fly like a dragon,
like the Phoenix, like Quetzalcoatl

Root Cause
How much turmoil of root
to lift a flower into the air?
I’m tired of knowing so little.

To Decorate is Human (Christmas Day, 2023)
Decor the halls with boughs of jolly
splintered loops, with quarantines of glass,
squared circles, circlings of squares....

Final Curtain
Sweet pulled curtain of fragilities!
Weariness, wrinkling, puckering,
shear: the coming to dissolution

Pressed Flowers
Real gardens can be exhaustingly
sensuous. Sometimes a printed garden
is sufficient.

Node
Congestion is like rough weather
but inside is cradled the quiet eye
of resignation

Air Plant
My mind designed
this shadowy plant, hurling it
against imagination’s wall

Root Ball
a gnarl of roots
gasping for the dark comfort of earth
two young stems escaping

Depression Arabesque
Who would hang up such a depleted thing:
this industrial snake, this stiffened weed,
this dead tendril, this strapping swan?

Infinite Nocturne
Chopin’s hand
severed from his music
orphaned in time

The Real Boxing Day
New Year’s Eve.
Farewell to 2023
and good riddance.

Like a Rolling Stone
Is this only a curtain
working to close me off?
It bites like a sawblade

To Clio,* the Proclaimer
This tome looks like a tombstone.
Better to read ahead than to study
where you’ve been.
*Clio was the Greek goddess of history

Snow Immemorial
snow lightens the stone,
freeing visions: a tortoise
in the sea, a polar bear

The Curvature Effect
The curving rip, tear, rent,
the line of beauty*
the serpent leaves behind
*English painter William Hogarth identified the serpentine curve
as the “Line of Beauty” and supported his case in his book, The
Analysis of Beauty, published in 1753.

June 14-16
Whatever happened last June
has been forgotten
living on as broken code

Vectors (courses and speeds)
several blades and cuttings:
a chalky dream of vapour,
with glistening wires. fingering trees

The Shadows Know
This entire haiku will be in
quotation marks: the”book”
rising from the “idea.”

Cold Sweat
Unrelenting winter:
we stand up to our ankles
in old snow.

Darkness Rises
It’s the darkness of ennui:
to see contagion, virus, spoilage
as well as the overhead wires.

Mooncalf
What seizing and restraining
upon a pale moon mask!
Tensed wires to hold it!

Platitudes Roasting on an Open Fire
It’s Christmas Eve:
one strong hinge
links hope and experience

Straight and Narrow
The usually fulfilled
sense of expectation,
but with off-ramps

“Should Old Inscriptions Be Forgot
and Never Brought to Mind....”
Hasty old jottings
on a chalkboard
become dusty new truths

Signal With Sighs
A circular plaque
wants precision planning
not sweeps of pencilled reverie

Supplicant
What I’m telling you
is not something I made up.
I saw an enfeebled tree reach out.

Fruits of the Earth
Bounty by the window:
onions and squashes
marooned in bowls

The Tree Opera: Act One
Soloists on the endless melding
of light-giving sun
and light-catching leaves

Rock Music
surging rocks in captivity
yearning to break out
into landscape

Persephone’s Garden
Persephone, wife to Hades,
grew her bloodless garden
backwards, from the top down

Deciduous Lace
This arboreal pelisson!
This leafy mantilla stretched
over the sky’s vanilla skin!

When We Dead Awaken*
winter-stricken tree
catkins like a thousand birds
some real birds too
*title of a play by Henrik Ibsen from 1899

For Gertrude Stein
shadows on the grass alas
dapplings on the path
pigeon poets in the dark

Silent Light*
The underworld shot through
with recollections of light,
squares and shafts of it, bright as breath
*The title of a series of optically ornate paintings from the
late 1960s by Toronto-based artist Harold Town (1924-1990)

Climbing is the New Descent
balconies like teeth in a comb
dark ladders
to the joy of sky

Dream Machine
I don’t ride now
but I dreamt my old bike back
black as rolling thunder

Walkway to Paradise
Passing through all three arbours
makes you strong enough
to wield the waiting barrow

Shadow Door*
Some doors seem ready to open.
Others, like this one, keep welcome in reserve.
The pearl-like lamp doesn’t break the ice.
*A phrase from the wild world of conjuring

Curvaceous
“By indirections,
find directions out.” *
How naturally trees dissemble!
*Some of Polonius’s life-advice to Hamlet.

Downward Chair
Its back is broken
one bone has fallen
from its skeleton

Keep Walking
What repose
is offered in such a bench’ s
unyielding slats?

Inscape
Before they began organizing,
trees were impulsive,
rhizomatic

Faerie Light
a sparkling sylph of morning light
needling along
a somnolent street

Lee Ka-sing 李 家 昇
Ka-sing grew up in Hong Kong and has been living 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 crosssection
with original prints produced by Hong Kong contemporary photographers
in the nineties. Lee Ka-sing was awarded “Artist of the Year” (1989) by the Hong
Kong Artists’ Guild, and he received the Fellowship for Artistic Development
(1999) presented by the 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),
and “Time Machine” (2021, with haiku by Gary Michael Dault). Recent sequential
photo works released in book form include “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 held in private and public collections, as well as in museums
such as the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, M+ Museum, Hong
Kong Heritage Museum, and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Gary Michael 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.