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TERRAIN, twelve
(photographs and haiku)
“On Speaking and Hearing,” a subtitle for this
volume suggested by Gary, marks the twelfth
volume of TERRAIN, an ongoing collaboration
featuring Ka-sing’s photographs paired with Gary’s
haiku responses. These are published daily on the
front page of the website oceanpounds.com.
Babelic* Fields
a sharpened angel
spoke to me
in grids of light
* The word “Babelic” is from Octavio Paz,
The Monkey Grammarian (New York: Seaver
Books, 1981), p.117
Changeling
I’ve changed my mind
Every time I look at you
I change my mind
Laser Gazer
gazing is a stationary gust
of sight
it can pierce like a horn
Inscrutable
the inchoate
nuzzles up to me in dreams
like a lonely porpoise
Birthday
Today I turned eighty-five
It was like the scraping
of a tight door
Absence Makes the Light Grow Fonder
you decide for yourself
where there will be shadow
and where the air will sleep
The Momentary
There’s little nourishment
in the momentary
I need longtime truths like leg traps
Standing Still
words caressed
and then crossed out
stakes driven into the ground
Unaccomplished
a vista without pride
without wreck
always unaccomplished
To Settle
Cars pass over windows
like pollen crossing a flower
Cars? They’d like to settle down
Sun Spot
a ghosted sun
beats weakly
against earth’s marbles
Our Lady of Disrepair
Planning a visit to the church
of perpetual nonfulfillment?
Note its broken boards
Vision and Design
I was thinking
of my right eyeball
swimming in sawdust
Elements in Trance*
having once made up fields of vision
objects weary of definition
a cord, once umbilical, dangles
*See Charles Olson’s poem, “The Moebius Strip.”
Still and All
with the world on the brink
of itself, tight as a fist,
I sleep like a baby bird
King Ubu
I want the whole
of the puppet, the shell and wire,
only its face looking outward*
* a few phrases harvested from Rilke’s poem “Puppen.”
The Prompt
I once had an idea
so clean so hot so shrill
I had to leave it hanging
The Recollections (Christmas Day, 2024)
Christmas is a tangle
not of shopping and baking
but of the eternal returns of memory
Rough Going
I am moved only by
rough, corrugated things:
tree bark, the surface of a choppy sea
The Drowning Pool
a slushy walk
past the drowning pool
past the aching factory
Outburst
big two-hearted flower
rustles like an angel
roars like a lion
Holiday Terrain
space is feathery not empty
and pinned with guest planets
once a year
The Paradox Plant (December 31, 2024)
a branch of New Year’s Eve
already dark in its striving
to be fresh and new
Hands Off (for 2025)!
Every year gets the clockface
it deserves. The clock for 2025
is already shot and stilled.
Bright Adjacency
a limb leans against a wall
clasping a proud darkness
eschewing cradles of gregarious light
The Muffled Drum
a dead sundial
cracked across the face
a leather gong
Staccato
a beeline schooling
confidence back and forth
obedience within this music
The Dark Side
Like Ulysses* I am a part
of all that I have met
It stays with me as scorched earth
* See the poem “Ulysses” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. published in 1842
Breath
something took your breath away
and yet you told me about it
and didn’t die
Ring of Fire*
the auricle of the sparrow’s nest
can be breached
but not the barricaded bird herself
*Written two hours after reading a poem titled “January
Sparrow” by Canadian poet Milton Acorn (1923-1986).
Orders of Magnitude
the blanched whale
like a cold front
its portcullis jaw* tight as a windmill
*”portcullis jaw” is from Chapter 81 of Melville’s Moby Dick.
The Eyes Have It
you are being watched--by eyes in the sea
by eyes in the rain, by eyes on a staircase
you are in a staring battle and you are losing
The Green Child
A small green buddha
sat in his tree
proclaiming to the sky, “it’s you or me!”
Sweet Dust
King David’s lyre
used to play by itself at midnight
now it’s a dry riverbed
Come as you Are
we keep trying to make nature
more gala; but under twilight
the long truths reassemble
Opacity
Forgetfulness is like this:
you say goodbye and hello
and yet nothing moves
Strictures
a city speaks in subdivision
why is its constant filleting so wearisome?
you can’t stretch in a city or cough
The Ghost in the Machine
A spectre in a haiku?
There will be tears
on the broken glass
Thin Ice
Ursula LeGuin*
whispered “let us begin!”
Even though the ice was thin.
*American writer Ursula LeGuin (1929-2018) was the immensely
accomplished author of fine science fiction novels, as well as short
stories and poems.
Shadowlands
trees don’t stand up for themselves
more and more they offer
surrogate shadows instead
Early On
pausing on the sidewalk
cars and trucks going by
laughing
Mount Athos: the Yard Sale
once a millennium
the old gods gather their old goods
and try to reap some mortal drachmas
Absence is Vertical
wire prompts
a faerie weave of fencing
yet my plants refuse the sun
Sentient Green
the old garden
feels too quiet
its gaping mouth its hanging ear
Something Lonely That Way Went*
a sad house with despairing cables
a dark fence with a fanged shadow
this is too many childhoods
* This title is a gloss on (an inversion of)
“Something Wicked This Way Comes,”
the title of a 1962 novel by Ray Bradbury
Empty Vessel
it was as if
an ocean liner had docked
at the bottom of our street.
Spiral Space
the shell’s spinning cavity
is hot and pauseless
a whorl of chalk
Prosthesis
halfway between a waking tree
and the end of the world
wood that couldn’t catch fire
The Supplicant
unlike human beings
trees weep
all the way down
For Los Angeles
a carbonized tree
on a stovetop hill
its branches clatter like bones
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.