TERRAIN,ten

TERRAIN, ten
(photographs and haiku)

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

Scone with the Wind
realtime grain nourishment
prettied up
as dainty Sunday scones

Household Gods
the best photographs
are about photographs
the next best are about books

The Flower at the Door
What’s a man to think
with a snowy Noh smile
sterilizing his bedroom?

Anthropomorphix, #26
A buxom table leg
is a committee woman with
an oleaginous orchid on her bosom

Alternating Currency
Ways to acquire wisdom:
from the sweet lumber of books
from the benediction of light

Pigeon Pi
she paints a watercolour pigeon
half in and half out
of real time

Imminence
the graphic nonchalance
of Francis Picabia
a puffy cloud braced with lightning

Hermitage
a scholar in his library:
the whispering words
are casting him in bronze

Swan Lakes
The man’s ailing wife
said she loved swans
so he swanned every window

Illumination
old house mysticism:
where the picture, the lamp
and the wallpaper become one

Notebookscape
The artist’s notebooks:
they yawn open like uproar
and close again like clams

Time Must have a Stop*
This sultry clock has stopped
but so has its photograph
everything is in alignment
*Title of a 1944 novel by Aldous Huxley

Divergences
Inward outward eyes
one on the books of memory
the other on a rose outside

Ancient of Days
the venerable house
is built on Leviathan,
flexing its silver scales

Summa Domestica
dear old books
toasting in the sun
near Our Lady of Solitude

Neighbourhood Pastoral
the house next door
against the rising sun
close but unknowable

Seascape
a cliff of storytelling upholstery
pounded by the surging sea
of a crazy quilt

Great Seal
the butterfly kiss
of architecture
a benediction in plaster

Aflame
one day you buy an etching*
and admire it for fifty years
now it glows
*by Swiss artist Dieter Roth (1930-1998)

The Walls Have Eyes
the old house is full of eyes:
a framed worthy looks askance
at your fall from elegance

Maria de la Soledad
cloaked in soft black clay
this tabletop Lady of Solitude
points like an arrow to heaven

Writhe Spirit
vitalized by its own texture
a settee throbs and flexes
into high animality

Jacob’s Staircase
household angels
ascend and descend the stairs
warmed by its fiery balusters

Animal Spirits
old books bound in leather
live on as creatures
purring growling roaring

Outreach
an old house oxidizes outwards
first as rusty shrubbery
then as striations of snow

Crystal Balls
paperweights in a paperless time
orphaned into
centripetal daydreams

Escape with Me!*
old houses
open into cabinets
that can take you anywhere
* Title of a 1939 book by Sir Osbert Sitwell
about a journey through China

Auto-Da-Fe
high on the wall
a mask of Voltaire
writhes in time’s furnace

A Bird in the Bush
In seedbed air
a twig can grow
a crow’s foot*
*sculpture by An Whitock

Playroom
We used to play
under the dining room table
you could meet cats there

Art in the Air
Reflection has its way
hurling a day-glo disc
from a painting * to the curtains
*by Wanda Koop

Artichoking
This ceramic artichoke
looks like a church in Norway
--but why tell you that?

Pretty Breathers
Curtains billow
like steep clouds
they move when you breathe*
* “A word moves about in the shadows
and swells the draperies.” Louis Emie,
quoted by Gaston Bachelard in his
The Poetics of Reverie (1971, p, 49)

Quiet Fire
a buddha’s hand
sits on the piano
its slim waterfall fingers!

Fecundity
objects germinate
in the old house’s welcoming air:
a bronze table lamp leafs out

Sit Down
The gregarious chair
curves towards you
its polished smile

Permanent Rabbit
Cast iron
forever looking alert
given its rabbitted shape

Books
Books are the front steps
of the flowering old house
Dust is its sweet pollen

Goblet
a goblet sits deep
in the old house
open like a word forming

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.