Margotlog: The Art of Losing

Margotlog: The Art of Losing

Elizabeth Bishop's villanelle, "The Art of Losing" has the command and sheen of great art. It's been one of my favorites for a very long time. Now I think of it after a day of losing first one, then another, then yet another crucial item: my car keys, my bigger cell phone, and almost my mind.

     The art of losing isn't hard to master
     so many things seem filled with the intent
     to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Losing and searching can become an obsession of flitting here, then there. Will the cell phone be hiding in the depths of my purse? Did I put it on the dining room floor as I ate dinner last night?


     Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
     of lost door keys, the hour badly spend.
     The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I call my very put-together friend whose house is just beyond the Ford Bridge i.e. just inside Minneapolis. "Mary," I say with a touch of hysteria in my voice, "I can't seem to find your house. Some nice man with a dress shop pointed me back to the Parkway, but now the numbers on 35th Avenue are totally off, far beyond yours!"

     ....I lost two cities, lovely ones. And vaster,
     some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
     I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

Plucking up my courage, still unable to find my cell phone. I take a discarded old phone to AT&T where a charming young man sets is up to work again with a new "sym" card. Now it's chirping as it powers up. But will I be able to turn it off once on the plane to Amherst? So far, that hasn't worked. It chirps, and chirps, and chirps.


     practice losing farther, losing faster:
     places, and names, and where it was you meant
     to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

Tomorrow in the dark before dawn, I will fly to visit this dear friend, younger than I am by at least a decade. Seven months ago, his partner of many years died of a cancer that could no longer be kept at bay. "I still weep every day," he tells me on the phone. Now as I turn myself toward the east, I sorrow for the one who is lost, joy for his life we both loved, though in vastly different intensites.

  --Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
     I love), I shan't have lied. It's evident
     the art of losing's not too hard to master
     though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.