Evil air, a frost-making stillness

Roger Cohen reports that things are getting so tight for New York bankers that one advised another he may even have to shoot the horses on his hobby farm upstate. The poor dear.

Puts me in mind of a scene in Michael Clayton, in which the hero finds a moment of respite when he approaches some horses high on a hill. I always wondered if its writer/director, Tony Gilroy, knew this poem by Ted Hughes.

In the fictional film, the horses embody -- perhaps -- something honest and elemental which is forgotten in the 'unreal' world of the city. For Cohen's real banker, by contrast, the horses are now an overhead, a liability to be liquidated.