On the Distance between the Maps versus Clocks.

Fig. 1. Hunting mushrooms in the dead of night, walking through woods where god and all his wildness lives. There is an owl in the tree and a mouse in the heather. I am one but not the other. It is terrifying.

Fig. 2. In the desert, hills dotted by scrub brush all around. I am walking along relics of railroad tracks, past a forgotten brickworks, the hot smell of baking clay still redolent. There is a scrap of paper. In someone else’s hand, it reads, “We made love on the tracks, under the sun.”

Fig. 3. By a canal shaped by a parabola of rough concrete. Wet, silver flashes leap over a spillway, dotting my face with spray. Here, things are coming to an end. Time was interrupted, and then uninterrupted; interrupted again.

Fig. 4. On the side of a road. The road reaches back endlessly, stretches out ahead like a yawning dog. A woman says something about a father; she is speaking of me. We drive away in an old brown truck.

Fig. 5. In a house, not my own. It is empty. I am not alone.

Bill Hutchison is a writer and student in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He works with animals and words.