TERRAIN,thirteen

TERRAIN, thirteen
(photographs and haiku)

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.

Reading Between the Lions
“Don’t ask me who’s influenced me.
A lion is made up of the lambs he’s digested,
and I’ve been reading all my life.”*
* a statement from Greek poet Giorgos Seferis, writer, diplomat
and Nobel laureate (1900-1971), sent to me today by an old
friend (we’ve known one another for fifty years), Bill Casselman.

Xanadu
the emperor beside
a blue black lake
his dreams rising like bees

Wide Worlds
The easy distance
is out the window
The difficult distance is within us

Come Read with Me!
Take travel.
Are books a goad?
Or cautionary tales?

Vent Vert*
Did you ever see Waterworld?
Stringy people without vegetables.
A root in a jar worth a million bucks.
* An exquisite perfume by Pierre Balmain, introduced in Paris
in 1947. The name means “Green Wind.”

Traum and Trauma
complex systems at large:
the lion coughs
the hawk drops onto the snow

Vegetable Juliet
the cactus (that’s us)
dreams, as we all do,
of more plushy, fragrant company

Round Midnight
every midnight
the Washington Monument
is granulated into stars

Ark Angel
Noah’s Ark moored on Ararat
emptied at last of its restlessness
quiet on a small lake of flowers

Geodesic Fan
I miss Buckminster Fuller.
He wanted to protect NYC by doming it.
I wish he’d thrown a dome over me!

Measure for Measure
there’s something Leonardo-esque
about a tripod with books nearby
maybe it’s the restless stability

Noir Pochoir
still life city at night
reflections in oily water
a car door closes near you

Beastly Maps
Foreign countries used to be
vertical and quiet as paintings
now they growl like caged beasts

The Souvenir
Well, I don’t think of this parcel
as refuse. For me, It replicates
the real Mt. Fuji out the window

Soylent Gold
The last stamen
watches the sandy light
remembers greenery

Electro-Nervosa
a writhing of cables
plugs and wires
feeding an unappeasable sun

Piercings
the best flowers float like boats
the worst drive into me
like hammered nails

Last Gleaming
plants need light
but too much becomes glare
and works like judgement

Seized
cats flicker like shot silk
they’re strong as spider web
then they turn to stone

Scanned
you thought this was an eye exam
but those patterns are your patterns
so now you know

A Dark Libation
the sepia sound of lies:
smoky bubbles rising through
a reactionary champagne

Aflame
Rima, the evanescent bird-girl,*
moves like a cloud of butterflies
through a confetti jungle
*Rima is the wild, mysterious heroine of
W.H. Hudson’s exotic novel Green
Mansions from 1903. There is a bas-relief
sculpture of Rima in London’s Hyde Park, erected
in 1922.

Pretty Paradigm
we hope for beauty
we wrap old bones in hard red
ribbons and rejoice

Elusive Sublimity
most of us live in foreground
we talk hot complexities
about distant ideals

Written on the Wind
a greeting card like a sail
a message drawn up
to the honoured winds

Geometry in Atlantis
mathematicians deep in the sea
forge their instruments
from seaweed and from bone

Lakeside Manner
Tom Thomson memorial plants
languish on the shores of Canoe Lake*
behind a scrim of mourning
*Canadian landscape painter Tom Thomson was paddling on
Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park where he died, apparently of a
boating accident, on July 8, 1917.

How Divinity Happens
...the old bleached bone
was then pushed up the ziggurat
to become the next gilded god

Equus Caballus
a gala horse
trying to leave domestic light
behind

Brownian Motion
a cacophony of Os
against a muslin field
milling like empty fish

Prehistory in the Making
someone sprayed a mythic beast
on the wall of my man-cave:
something pachydermic and rodentia

Veil Tale
veils are sublime
weaving open shadows
offering half-truths

Capture and Release
We grant a camera sentience
because its choices sometimes
resemble meaning. But only sometimes

Prancer
there is a need for horses again
their furious flexing
their pride demanding as spurs

Vineland
The quality of mercy is not strained
it droppeth as a gentle vine from heaven*
upon the lives beneath
*Adapted from a speech by Portia in Shakespeare’s
The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, scene 1.

Star Treks
Two journeys then:
One, a walk in the blue wind.
Two, the ascent of a paper mountain

Mother Ship
gazing up to the light
in the abject worship
of the next fraudulent deity

Storm Cellar
emergency stuff: old bullets
from a gunpowder basement,
tubes of cheese, chunks of chalk

Acuity
We bless all pointed things!
We ponder the courage it takes
to make direction!

Black Boxes
They might have been giants,
one standing on the other’s
shoulders. But no.

Cold Waiver
the winter flag
the featureless purity of its sheeting
waves stiffly

Conclave
my beside godlets
gather every night to discuss
whether it shall be heads or wings

Beatitude
our young untried worlds
all our green desires
clasped in a bowl

Whiter Shapes of Pale
on the masks and bones
of the decorated dead
visceral time puckers and curls

Admonitions
living is made of dot and dash
pleasure resides in the pinwheel
death still comes in short cuts

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.