TERRAIN,two

TERRAIN, two
(photographs and haiku)

Decoratif
How art fails: in settling for sagging
goddesses holding up a sprig of plant
or by the listless lapping of a leaf motif

A Delay in Glass*
When I was young I expected
these towering breastplates of late capitalism
to nourish and protect me. They never did.
*Marcel Duchamp

Heavy Hand
Does anyone look up anymore?
Why bother? There’s only a firmament
of roof pressing down. Not many stars.

Negentropic
Modernism is forgiving. So many second chances!
Stroppings and flanges, parallel planes and edges.
You could always catch up!

Urban Scrawl
Urban scribbling. You see it
with the corner of your eye. If you stare
it scratches down into glassy shadows

Flaccid
a ruckus of brushwood
defers to the axial tree in its midst
from which someone has strung a weak ladder

Peripheral Motion
inasmuch as you find resolution
at the centre of things
energy roils at the edges

Sisyphus
This scholar rock rolled uphill
from the beach to block my present path
how should I resent such intractability?

Ennoblement
symmetry makes a tree hieratic
suddenly, against a thready sky,
a cathedral facade!

Hotbed
not all flowers are soft, lambent
when there are tensions in the garden
already sibilant blossoms get hysterical

Serpentine
armed conifers pulling aside
to reveal a pathway
would it were the road to Cold Mountain!

Tea Tree
what constitutes a tea party?
two petal-thin cups
and a bronze table lamp leafing out

Otherwise
a diving bell in a living room
a domed figure looking out
at your looking in

Somnolence
it’s an old piano (it’s ours!)
standing on a mushy carpet
a coverlet nestled over its ivory bones

Archangel
there are so many avowals of delight
in a tangled garden
you need the clarity of an arbour to get in

Bathing Beauty
fluted, petalled
the old bird bath stands open
like a flower

Curtains
one window curtain pulled aside
looks fearful or clandestine
two pulled aside looks conspiratorial

Sweet Travail
so much work
painting notebooks in a row
to be broken open someday like a sunrise

Pianissimo
a mute piano, keys clenched
closed as a casket
its music in camera

Little Top
a tabletop circus
with real dust instead of sawdust
cannot ringmaster memories

Holistic
I know this chair
in this noble nostalgic photo
you can’t see the hole in its seat

Persistent
the walls are thin
sounds come murmuring through
like persistent flowers pushing through gaps

Gyroscope
round and round through
the narrowing gyre*
‘till time doth gimble in the wabe**
*after W.B.Yeats in “The Second Coming”
** see Lewis Carroll, “Jabberwocky”

Restraint
two kinds of barricade:
one for rounded animals like hippos
another for diagonal creatures like jackals

Stealth
shadows creep up
on an unsuspecting chair
affronted by its aplomb

Windbreak
the thin green line
the dark phalanx protects giggling
sweetgrasses as well as curtailing them

The Clash
the battle of the trees and the wires
the wet green language of leaf and stem
contending with the dry sizzle of cable

Sap
every spring a tree takes stock of itself
its ignoble thoughts slither away
like snakes of sap

Again, for Tomio Nitto
how about we lower a curtain
on the desert internet and refresh it
with genial monsters?

Cancel
in the west we read from left to right
the past receding the future barrelling down
we ignore the big cancellation

Hanger
a plant suspended above freedom
cries out to its unconfined fellows
in a spume of cottony anguish

Matrix
every mark on an open ground
makes the matrix smaller
like rolling your hand into a fist

Pavilion
this pavilion shows things in filament
flickerings and jingling, wink and dash
firefly darts in the fraying solidity of dreaming

Fullness
a tree carved out of itself
in the fullness of the sun
opens the shunts of its cloistered heart

Hotel Atlantis
an elevation of Neptune’s Hotel Atlantis
a pixel-wall of moonwater language
hollow globular sounds soft as gelatin

Shrubbery
The shrubbery perplex: catkins, loops,
leathery twist-ties, nearly blossoming
knots applauding in sunlight

Switches
eternal tracks iron in the soul
only switches lift an eyebrow
of the momentary

Ridge
there are furtive bells in the trees
there is a gasp of space ahead
what will befall us over the ridge?

Striker
how about we just relax
and pretend this weary tree
is going bowling?

Lyre
a fervid veil two wings wide
lyre of green leaves
an altarpiece that never remembers
(for Tomio Nitto)

Artisans
runaway sedges
feel the centripetal pull of form
and start a vase

Timer
the time tree
old Chronos homebase
whispers of endless return

Road and Track
someone came by
someone made a carving with a car
as poignant as a bison at Altamira

Bonbons
hard candy from the forest
arboreal allsorts
cut from sugar and tears

Skylight
bricks of opaque light
build up the struggling house
fragile under the sky’s blossoming fire

Tantrum
angry poet throws chair at wall
wall falls to pieces
chair hangs in space like a bent star

Chalk River
once a meander of river
with people leaning over
before the big heat

Holiday
flowers like schoolchildren
released from earth, from class
bright whispers, an old clamour

One-Way
a tectonic phantom
from the earth’s deep pain
whispers the unhearable

Withheld
the moistening gardener
magically englassed
the plants turn to paper

Lee Ka-sing 李 家 昇
Ka-sing grew up in Hong Kong and lives 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 cross-section,
with original prints produced by Hong Kong contemporary photographers in
the nineties. Lee Ka-sing was awarded “Artist of the Year” (1989) by Hong Kong
Artists’ Guild, and the Fellowship for Artistic Development (1999) presented by
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). “Time Machine” (2021, with
haiku by Gary Michael Dault). Recent sequential photo work released in book
form: ”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 in private
and public collections, and in museums such as Tokyo Metropolitan Museum
of Photography, M+ Museum, Hong Kong Heritage Museum and Hong Kong
University of Science and Technology.
Gary Mihael 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.