Study for Slashed Horse

Such cresting waves in a procession of vehicles, passing before a mound of concrete, in the place he had escaped, he had seen from an elevated position, a position from which one could not be sure the cars were being operated at all. There is nothing of traffic in worms, he said, none of the bitter, necessary intent. He had not seen a car for days, perhaps weeks—the end of a nondescript autumn had distended into a lashing long winter. Opaque patches of ice were amassing across each new length of field; signs warning of unidentifiable peat bogs grew more and more sporadic, but he walked until those signs had stopped appearing. An epoch passed before another stop—scum, colonising border regions along concrete discarded in a brook. His eyes had risen to the farther bank, where a substation was corroding, rivulets of rust trailing into the stream out of a gaping wound in the rear. Another hundred miles spent bathed in the sky, and he came to an unintelligible boundary stone, beneath generations of lichen, and he walked on. The purpose of all this, he interjected, had been the purpose of litter, to his mind, preoccupied as he had been with an exercise in structuring his vast plane: each apparent field had been demarcated, in his head, with imagined hedgerows, dividing the perceptible world so that he would not lose his bearings. In the right-hand-inside pocket of his coat had been a photograph, a reproduction image of a flock of ewes herded around a snowdrift in either the Hardangervidda or the Hallingskarvet national park. Writing on the back of the picture read "1881, Ha" and he was unable to answer when I asked where he had first acquired it. Nothing bare seduces, he told me. Certain contours never coherent to him, hung in the stale air of the region, neither allusive nor outright. In an unsown cabbage field, in the Aukštaitija region of Lithuania he approximated, he had come to an elderly farmer, weeping and raving, lying beside whom had been the fresh remains of a gelded colt.