TERRAIN,fourteen

TERRAIN, fourteen
(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.

Ascension Machine
Jacob’s ladder
with handyman angels
ascending and descending

Inclined Planes
most of what leans (like a picture)
falls in failure or rises to grace.
But ladders must stay leaning

Astronomical
I’ll climb a ladder
past everything I know
up to the ceiling sun

Inward Bound
An Archive:
a container ship made of paper
its anchor hooked in your mind

Shipshape
zip zip clamouring vectors
awaiting the pinch
of a carpenter’s order

The Bite
leg-trap design:
a small clean idea
tightens over the greater project

Still Photos Run Deep
a photograph is a quiet room
where you sit still and see
a computer is like a train window

Half and Half
Half in anger, half in joy
i sent my lover a tray of blossoms
half dead half alive

Oblique Oblige
In the realm of vertical things
a stoop-shouldered ladder
is vulnerable and local

Levels of Experience
lovely levels telling the truth
one by laser the other with
its precious vials of gravity oil

The Raw and The Cooked
fresh grids goad our ambitions
but splayed and distressed beams
give us back ourselves

The Handyman Play
like curtains parting
sheets of riff-raff material
lean away--and suddenly a door!

Behind the Veil
There is too much fact
behind the veil:
wiser to keep it covered

The Curator’s Creed
To preserve the uproar of art
To press it with distance
To condomize its thrust

Downsizing
if you looked long and hard
you saw a sharp new star
and then a golden airplane

Unfinish
you pile your materials in one place
some going and some just coming
and you think about them as they are

A Corner of the Universe
A planed, tightly-fitted
corner, its useless beauty
exhilarating

Fever Tree
the ladder
like a rising temperature
climbs above the placebo body

Moritat
the shark smiles
with his teeth, dear,
and thrashes with renovators

Code Red
communicators speak to us in red
they strap on like bridles
and hang afterwards like bats

Cylindrical Light
like a piston in a cylinder
light plummets down
then lifts back to darkness*
*(ad infinitem)

Brush Up Your Durer*
It might be St. Jerome’s study
if there were a lion lying there
plus a sleeping dog and a skull
*An echo of the song “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” in the Cole
Porter musical Kiss Me Kate from 1948.

Angles of Incident
I suppose straight and true is bracing
but I like leaning and hungry members
parallel lines that meet

Two Legs Bad*
a wanted poster
from the far side of the moon
a portrait of an approximate being
*See the watchcry from George Orwell’s 1945 novella, Animal
Farm (“Two legs bad, four legs good....”)

Captain Nemo’s Drawing Room*
the underwaterness of the room
a slippery glistening that is uncanny
like space in the raised Nautilus
*Captain Nemo was the submariner genius (the Nautilus was
his nuclear-powered submarine) of Jules Verne’s novel, Twenty
Thousand Leagues Under the Sea from 1871. James Mason
played Captain Nermo in the 1954 Walt Disney film.

Scrambled
hierarchical soundings from space
vertical whispers
pushing condos in Alpha Centauri

Form & Informe
What is most beautiful in construction:
the whip-cracking rectitude of an angle
or the crawling viscera of rawness?

The Doors of Perception
as negative space it’s a doorway
as a positive space it’s a monolith
full of stars

The Blue Light*
drywall offers placidity
but muffles up a building’s
sharp blue discourse
*Title of a 1932 German film starring and directed by
Leni Riefenstahl.

Whiplash
the secret to renovation
is to show the project who’s boss
cracking a silvered whip helps

Mantlepiece
the earth’s mantle
tamed like bread dough
domed against a wall

Full Circle
light at the end of renovation
cranes fly over the Neva
a leopard freezes on a mountain top

Chairman of the Boards
the music of renovation
spins round and round
a chair its axle

Table Rasa*
You work by the Carpenter’s Rule:
“cut to fit, hammer into place.”
The table is for remonstrance
*a pun on the latin phrase “Tabula rasa”
meaning “smooth or erased tablet” or “the
mind in its original state before experience.”

On Edge
They say you can’t tell a book
by its cover but sometimes
you can. Not so with pictures.

Archive Fever
Here’s something Thelonious Monk said:
“put it down
got to pick it up.” *
*and vice-versa

Frontality
anything full frontal
including ladders
is vulnerable, open and light

The Sharpening Fog
too much accumulated thinking
and you’ll need an overwash
of oceanic loneliness

The Long Goodbye
under a ceiling-bright future
new clouds dance on new walls
a pillar of old earth bids farewell

Stand Tall
all ladders, supporters of gravity,
lean like adjutants; I’d pay a lot
to see one stand up straight like a flower

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.