TERRAIN,nine

TERRAIN, nine
(photographs and haiku)

This is the ninth volume of TERRAIN,
an ongoing collaboration between two artists,
featuring Ka-sing’s photographs and
Gary’s haiku in response.

Striplings
wood branching out
a touch of fabrication
makes all trees kin

The Pointer
A gnarled tree trunk
witness to the pain of time
points like Leonardo’s John the Baptist

Sweet Tree of Youth
the tree remembers its nursuryhood
when it was treeney treeney
greeny*
*Federico Garcia Lorca, “Treeney Treeney”
in The Cricket Sings (New York: New Directions,
1980).

Shapeshifter
a fallen trunk
once a proud backbone
now a lizard, a praying mantis

The Sound of Silence
a dry hippo
opens its stygian jaws
yawning for the lost river

Three-Way Split
you can see where this
was going: three minds
born of a single thought

The Nautilus
a miniature Leviathan
plys the surly sea
of leaves

Whole and Parts
There is nothing more deft
in Rodin: the slain wood
pulls together with great subtlety

Sesame
the tree’s sacred gate
is not long open
before filling with dry leaves

The Sylvan Smile
the animal smile
is everywhere
for example in a cut tree

On Being Perhaps Too Associative
It’s pleasurable to untether the mind
and let it wander: I look at this and I see
Hiroshi Teshigahara’s film, Woman in the Dunes*
*Made in 1964 from Kobe Abe’s 1962 novel

Aurora Arborealis
beyond any tree trunk
a firmament-high screen
flickers with humming lightshow

Grassy Knoll
thin straw-like spears
once home to throbbing chlorophyll
fall across inert treewood

Trencherman
this old deciduous mask
its rictus smile
like a battleground trench

Incision
the drumhead stump
compromised
by a sharp bite of light

Very Like a Beaver
Remember when Hamlet teases Polonius
that clouds can look like creatures--a camel,
a whale? Well, this trunk looks like a beaver.

Image Bank
What comes unbidden to mind:
scimitar, battle-axe, sling blade,
halberd, cleaver

Tree Crier
A sylvan discourse rises like a shout
from the cut tree
now a loudspeaker

TreePad
the cut surface
is now a blackboard
with scratchy drawings

Well Enough Alone
Unable to let things be:
a trunk is the White Cliffs of Dover,
a crocodile’s maw, a 1948 Buick’s grin

Deep Woods
Is that a figure spelunking wood caves?
I say it’s Jules Verne
Voyaging to the Centre of the Earth

Speaking Parts
the opulent stump
its cushioned utterance
a tear in its wooden flesh

UnRest
dreams released from a felled tree:
a dinosaur’s fallen head
teeth still alive

Trunk of Ages
coils of age
one lying lifeline
traversing the trunk’s open palm

Hit Man
My friend tree
I sawed you down*
now I want to unplug the sun
* These two lines are from American poet,
Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970)

The Snout is Out
a stump of trunk
snouted like a pig
surprised at its own strength

Wood, Waiting
nothing is inert
everything remembers new lives
tree trunks posit leaves in the sky

Insect in Paradise
labial limbs
a modest tree
with insistent dragonfly

Mack the Axe
when the axe bites
with its blade dear*
the chips fall where they may
*A variation on the Bertolt Brecht / Kurt Weill song,
“Mack the Knife” from their 1928 musical play, The
Threepenny Opera.

Muted
Tom-toms in the hay
sound beside its absorption
specificity in the grass alas

Barbaric Yawp*
the split opens the tree
to trashy readings: the Pac-Man
maw, the “Anguished Face” emoji
*”I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 1892

Unsaved Remnant
the anguish of the less than whole
wood without the tree
the anti-prosthesis, the not-belonging

Crater Violet*
A foreskinned crater,
the ghost
of a wooden volcano
* a deplorable but for me irresistible pun
on “Prater Violet,” the title of Christopher
Isherwood’s 1945 novel about filmmaking.

Let It Come Down*
the armouring bark
the exposed wood flesh
the sky getting closer
*The title of a 1952 novel by American writer
and composer Paul Bowles (1910-1999)

A Tree by any other Name
Our decisions deceive us:
bench, bridge, highway, runway
there’s always a fallen tree

Mind-Forg’d Manacles*
though bound only by cast shadows,
the cut tree cannot consider
any further move
*The phrase is from the poem, “London” by
William Blake (in his Songs of Experience, 1794).

Unstoppable
the mother ship is stilled
but an upstart pod
peels off on a new mission

Tensegrity*
monumental trunk
like a Rodin
like an eagle with furled wings
* Tensional integrity is a structural principle (much explored by
Buckmininster Fuller) based on a system of isolated components
under compression inside a network of continuous tension.

Time Immemorial
The clock at the foot
of the tree reads ten-ten
and will proclaim it always

Tree Trash
A hollow tree trunk
an Edward Weston pepper
but brimming with natural refuse

Unheard Music
striations like the palm of your hand
though a violin may form
around that sounding rent

The Anti-Lifeline
the tree’s fascia
is smooth and unblemished
except for its rictus crack

A Cold Bier
a cut tree’s bier
with mourning leaves
recalling the old days of lift

“The soul of an ancient bell goes
back to a young tree.” *
the soul of an ancient tree
searches for a second use:
perhaps a bench.
* Victor Segalen, Pictures (London: Quartet Books,
1991), p. 11.

Starting Over
the tree is sheared away
the fresh trunk opens to the sun
this time it will be a flower

Chip Ahoy
a bright chip
sprightly as a canary
powers up the dead tree

Angle of Incident
Forest Management
supports a two-tier
system of felling

One-Way Street
wood goes round and round
like cream in coffee
inner vectors can’t stop the spin

A Note from the Teacher(s)
This hieratic tree was felled
a thousand years ago
by space sailors--who left a message

The Unkindest Cut of All
The cut tree
forgives the saw*
but remembers the severance
* See poet William Blake’s “The cut worm forgives
the plow” from his The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793)

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.