Woman And Dog (There Are No Horses)

March 2026

Ekphrastically speaking: There are no horses.

Why the hell did I write that? In the upper left hand corner, what are the words doing there, half-erased, clinging faintly to the paper fiber grooves? A true ghost story, of horses, a pack of equines faintly traced on ether. No, there are not horses here. Rather, a little pig-dog, muddily frumping in baby blue. A tiny teacup lapdog of a bluet, wrapped around a bifurcated stool leg.

There are no horses: a truthful palimpsest.

Artists like to use the term palimpsest all the time and liberally. The word is conceptually smeared all over their art, thick like a schmear of lox or jam on bread. Why? The word sounds lovely and Greek on the tongue, for one. It means:

a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain. Something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form.

A reuse or a refuse—a refusal? A refusal of horses (like a gaggle of geese or a pride of lions), which insist on not emerging into the foreground of the image, yet retain a spectral presence persistent in the dim utterance of the thing.

Her arms are raised but there is no distinct action being performed. Perhaps she yearns for the horse that is not there. Or the multiple horses that definitely should be there, petted by her sinewy blue arms. She pulls at invisible strands of mane with a tenderness reserved for horses and horses only, of which there are none. Something the dog knows deeply, but she does not.