One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop
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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!) a disaster.

Anyway! A little wonderful sub-idea in this poem is the idea of a city as something you can lose and if it`s something you can lose, it`s something you can have. I have New York, after almost long long years not the way someone who grew up there has it, but I have my version of it, a geographical and social and romantic and practical map etched in my neural pathways.

If I find out that some unforeseen circumstance is going to take me to Clinton and Rivington and I`m at 28th and 7th, I don`t have to look at a map to figure out how I`m going to get there. I never get confused anymore, coming up from the subway, and accidentally walk a block in the wrong direction. I have some idea, in most neighborhoods below Times Square and in Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Clinton Hill, Fort Greene, Prospect Heights and Cobble/Boerum Hill, of where I could grab dinner or a sandwich or a coffee or a quick drink or find a public bathroom or make keys or kill a half-hour in bad weather. This ability might sound banal but you know, it`s taken me every minute of long years to get to that level of facility. And while it`s satisfying, this having, it`s also bittersweet: while I was going around building up this effortless familiarity, I inevitably ratcheted up some no-fly zones on that mental map nothing major, just some streets or bars or alleys I avoid here and there. Elizabeth B. might say I`ve lost them.

This is my tribute to New York City that I love.. It`s where I spent my adulthood, 
 where my heart is.. and where my mind never leaves..


Pictures were captured one beautiful morning coming out of my apartment, and leaving my work along the way to my destination, home sweet home.