Loss is an experience of every day. What we've lost might not be evident; or if it is, we may not know the consequences it bears, the ways it may or may not echo in the days, weeks or years that follow. Indeed, to call losing an art, as does Elizabeth Bishop in the following poem, may be to raise an ordinary, unexpected experience to a conscious craft. The intent is seldom our own. "so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost / that their loss is no disaster." But awareness of loss carries − more or less − a burden of loss. I am less for having lost, or so it seems. So Bishop's reminder is useful: losing is daily fare. Often enough, it makes room for something new.
One Art
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.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
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.
—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.