TERRAIN,eight

TERRAIN, eight
(photographs and haiku)

This is the eighth volume of TERRAIN,
an ongoing collaboration between two artists,
featuring Ka-sing’s photographs and
Gary’s haiku in response.

Camera Obscura
the world’s smallest photographer
cloaked in forgetfulness
trying to focus on freedom

A Runic Morning
the sun comes up in code
flooding its obscurantist dictates
over a dark morning

Eyeless Jack
Somebody cut the eyes out
making a take-home Oedipus
Funny, I’m reading Eyeless in Gaza* right now
*A novel by Aldous Huxley from 1936

A Rage for Order
As we inch closer to Apocalypse
the stars assume an order
we could never achieve

Yggdrasil*
This arbor vitae
now masquerading as a Ficus Benjamina
still pulls together the corners of creation
*Yggdrasil is the giant ash tree (in Norse mythology) that
nourishes and supports
the secrets of life and knowledge.

I’ll Be Seeing You
a lens from the side
exquisite convexity
I see my cats’ eyes this way

Blue Angels
angels of exhalation
rising like bubbles
from another breath

Substack
in such a thin lunar light
a compression of regular plates
ages fast

Outpost
dark shrine teapot
deep as a mountain
a vowel for tea

Nocturne
a plant in a greenless room
no light but the TV
or when the fridge door opens

The Nitto Codices*
notebooks like cherry blossoms
nodding and humming
around the obsidian square of mind
* Notebooks by artist Tomio Nitto; Nitto’s multifarious activities
include regular contributions to the online Monday Artpost.

Revisitation
A breath-sized vision
of dear Sukimoto*
prowling through memory
*Sukimoto was the sweet Tuxedo cat owned
and loved by Holly Lee and Lee Ka-sing
from 2007 until his death last year.

The Capsule Hotel
Big Breather
gives safe conduct
to bolts of tubular air

Devil’s Food
a layer cake in pearly light
put down the haiku
and cut yourself a slice

Angle of Incident
(to Aleksandr Rodchenko)
pushing off from the dock
dreaming solids
for after your life

Seppuku Song
Mishima, glaring over a rose,
word-sailor fallen from
grace with time*
* An allusion to the title of Yukio Mishima’s 1965 novel, The Sailor who
Fell from Grace with the Sea.

The Light of the World
The way the light falls
a wall of books
glows like burning candles

Hot Horse Flower
This is what you get
when you plant a pony in a pot:
a prancing horse-flower

You think the forest is beautiful? That’s
nothing. You should see its photograph!!!
Arboreal Theology:
a pop-up woodland
makes for green reverence

For Rima* with Love and Squalor
What blessed disillusionment!
I’ve got those dug-in Sansevierian** blues!
Plus an outstretched idol in the gilded distance
* Rima is the Forest Girl heroine of the W. H. Hudson novel,
Green Mansions (1904).
** Sansevieria is the botanical name for Snake Plant

The Anti-Albatross
A coal-black Monitor-Bird
passed over our camp
dropped an iron feather on our star-map

Undersoul Food
Persephone, Queen of the Underworld,
whips up some chthonic pancakes
where the griddle is always hot.

Random Harvest
a blizzard of shark fins
and pup tents blown into place
by the stationary wind

The Overlords*
It’s from my sci-fi childhood:
a dark pointed ship
sinks through a sandy sky
*The Overlords are the apparently peaceful aliens who
invade Earth in Arthur C. Clarke’s novel, Childhood’s End (1953)

No More For Me, I’m Stuffed!
Why is imprecision so attractive?
It always trumps
exactitude.

The Pegasus Memorandum
if I were a horse which I’m not,
of course, I’d mount the sky
like that Pegasus guy.

Semper Recordatus: Hamlet’s Tablet
“My tables!--meet it is that I
set it down.”* Today he would have
fumbled for his “tablet.” Record it all.
* Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5, lines 105-109.

Remember it Again, Sam
Rick and Louis discussing
the beginning of their “beautiful friendship”
in Casablanca. Ignore the dragon.

Hood of Thorns
This armoured star, darkstruck,
bristling with need,
this prickly planet, Mind

A Fable
The cat and the clock:
is it time to miraud the canary
or is the bird already gone?

Black Spring*
A spring, like the lambent season,
can soften blows and lift spirits.
Be wary of its verve!
*The title of a hectic memoir by American writer Henry Miller,
published in 1936, right after
his Tropic of Cancer.
Spring

Lost Horizon
beyond replications
of mind, you see with tundra vision:
blue cities, brittle as breath
Ice

A Falling Dream
an orchid pushes
against the greatcoat of night
its kisses fail in the dark
Orchid

Honey Map
the unlikable world
comes around with its sugary gifts
I push its smiling hand away
Honeycomb

A Pillow Book
you turn the honey’d pages
of a somnolent old book
looking for something solid to hold
Read

The M of the People
I saw the letter M in black*
it stood persuasively in space
until a second dream
* An echo of a line from the poem “The Great Figure” (1920) by
William Carlos Williams and of the title of the Charles Demuth
painting inspired by the poem,”I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold” from
1928.
M

Words to Fail By
A goal? Perhaps a reminder?
An order (Be Happy or Else!!)?
A prayerful desire (in votive letters)?
Happy

UDO: Unidentified Domestic Object
Most people think flying saucers
are big, but they’re actually
the size of teacups
Heart-shaped dish

The Replicant
A hollow stare
amplified by a hostile mirror
into surveillance
Double

Odyssean Gold
The upper book can be anything you want,
but the gilded book beneath is The Odyssey:
see Odysseus’s galley surging back to Ithaca?
Iliad and Odyssey

Shape Shifter
Ka-sing tells me it’s an antenna
and he should know. But I think
it’s a noisemaker or a bathysphere
Antenna

The Anyone Profile
a generalized face, venerable
in gold; it could be Dante
or Schumann or Basil Rathbone
Profile

Bed Bearing the Sands of Time
It makes me want to re-watch Hidalgo
and think about Rimbaud
crossing the Somali Desert to Harar
Bed

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.