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TERRAIN,twelve

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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.





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