One Art by Elizabeth Bishop

One Art
by: Elizabeth Bishop

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.

I didn't find this poem until my college years, much like a few others I've mentioned here in the past, and for that I am again a little sad.  But it came to me during a time when I was having some personal struggles and spoke to me in a way that I will never quite forget.

There is something terrible about losing the people in our lives, because we don't just lose them as people, but we also lose the little things about them over time--how they sound, what they smelled like, the things they did....  The memories that we have of them degrade over time until they're memories of memories--or the feelings of half-remembered moments that trigger an image in our thoughts.  Like pictures, they're a facsimile--not quite the real thing, but the remembered thing, caught in our mind's eye even as pictures are caught on photographic paper or digital imaging.

My step-dad's father passed away after enduring a heart-breaking bout of Alzheimer's.  My grandma chose to stay and care for him in his final years of life, and the burden of those memories are hers and hers alone.  Dad doesn't talk about it much, but there are little things that tell me how much he misses his dad--the drawing table his dad used to use for architectural drawings, and the tools his dad used to use still living somewhere in our family's home back in Bellville.  

The few memories I have of my grandad are those where we conspired together to steal black olives from the holiday table, or him sitting in the living room of their family home back in Kansas City in his comfy chair while we watched TV or talked when we would visit.  Sadly, I didn't get to know him well, as the disease started in my teenage years; so, we didn't see them much.

I remember one trip where they came to visit, and watching my parents sit with my grandparents, I could tell how hard things were, but I couldn't really understand it.  Maybe I wasn't meant to.  But it hurts to know that I likely squandered those last moments that I had with him.

My own dad passed away in 1999.  At the time, I was struggling with who I was and what I wanted to be in life.  I'd essentially been told that I wasn't serious enough about my vocal training to complete my degree in it, and it was true.  I wasn't.  But that's the only thing I had considered for my life when I left high school.  He passed away as I was trying to put my life back together--hoping that there'd be a point in the near future when I could show him that all his love and hopes for me were not misguided or wrong.

But then he was just gone.

I don't know if it's funny or just stupid how our minds take us to imagined futures that we'll never get to share with the people we've lost, but I'd thought I'd one day share a walk down an aisle with him as I was getting married.  Or that he'd get to see me perform.  All the hopes I'd had for my future seemed to die along with him, and for a long while after his funeral, I just kind of drifted through life.  The sad thing is, we weren't all that close.  He'd left me with my mom when they divorced, and I never really begrudged him that--or the futures that he built with other people after that.  But we lived far apart in different states, and so I mostly got phone calls, letters, and presents from him.  The few times I visited that I can remember were fraught experiences for one reason or another.

He'd had a heart attack when I was in junior high, I think, and they weren't certain he'd recover then.  But after heart surgery, he lived another thirteen years--years in which I hope he was happy.  He seems to have been, though there are times, now, when I wish I could ask him about those experiences--what they were like, how he was feeling.  Had being that near to death changed him in some way?  What was his favorite color?  His favorite anything?  These are questions for which I don't have a ready answer.

Most of my recollections of him are tied to pictures that we took, which I don't really remember having been taken.  There are things my mom has told me since that feel like memories--or at least I have a vague recollection of them.  And there's the last trip I took when I visited he and his wife, Marion, up in Bremerton, Washington--where we went to see the Olympic Mountains and Mount St. Helen's.  But even then, the memories feel brittle and cracked somehow--as though I wasn't entirely wanted there, or I expected too much materially, or I wasn't emotionally aware enough yet to fully understand what was going on around me.

I have this ...fleeting recollection of being at the zoo with my dad and us watching the flamingos.  I have this sense that we did it often, and I don't know why he loved doing that with me so much.  But there is this feeling I recall of love and wonder surrounding us both as we said the name "flamingo!"

One thing I know for certain is that my dad loved books; I think my fondest memory is of the time we were in a mall bookstore together.  I don't remember where it was, or what we were looking at, or even what we bought there; but I remember thinking that it was just...cool...to be with my dad in a bookstore, sharing my love of books with him and finding out that he had a shared love of them, too.

These feelings that I'm sharing with you flow much like the words of the poem above.  The memories are of little things--memories shared and created, but end up being all I have left of something truly important in my life.

But as she says in her first lines:

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.

This is life--the art of life--the way we lose things, and then places, and then people.  It's the art of growing from a child to an adult; it's the little things that get lost along the way--sometimes important things even, like her mother's watch.  But life continues on.

I think my favorite part of this whole poem though is that first line in the last stanza:

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love that she made gesture the end-word of that line--giving the reader a place to pause--inviting us, too, to remember someone we've lost and the mannerisms that defined them.  And then, and only then does she continue "I love)."  And it's not "I love you," because the you isn't there--the words unfinished because the conversation can't be had.  Just that parenthesized "I love" that leads onto that subtle admission that even those things start to get lost, too.

I love her tone that feels like something of a confession as she relates her feelings of disaster for having forgotten things about the person she loves.  I love that she admits to it, allowing us by her own admission, to feel the pain of that loss in our own lives, too.   And I love the simple assurance that it resolves into at the end--that this is just the way of things, the way things are, the one art of life--the one truth:

...I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

 And one day, we will all experience our own loss of life.

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Even so, that is the one art--the art of losing everything we are.  And yet, Elizabeth Bishop seems to be saying that even if we should die, even if we should have lost everything that makes us who we are, it won't be a terrible thing or a disastrous thing, but rather a commonality that makes us all one in the end.  And I like that--that sense that what is lost isn't ever really lost; it's just changed from being in our control to being outside of it.   And that's okay, because it's not the end of the world--just the end of our journey of losses within it.