The half-remembered Bly poem exemplifies to me one of life's inevitable recurring tragedies -- the thing, or place, or person encountered once in passing only to prove irrecoverable after the fact. We vainly wander the streets of once-familiar towns seeking out a place that is no longer; we comb the recesses of Google and Facebook in search of people long since absent from our lives.

One summer night some years back my friend Alex and I embarked on a longitudinal Manhattan pub crawl which commenced before noon at an Irish bar on the Upper West Side and concluded well after two AM in the Village. After fourteen hours of biker joints and discount sushi and calypso at SOB's, we stumbled into a shoebox of a place somewhere down off Houston street which was oddly subdued amidst the clamor of downtown on a Saturday night. The bar was scarred but polished wood with a handfull of stools and a good rail of drafts, and a crew of regulars were devouring plates of steamed mussels and fish chowder. The bartender was without question the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in the flesh.

Her name was Shoshanna, she was (of course) trying to make it as an actress, she was entranced by my descriptions of the Maine Coast and professed a lifelong desire to see the leaves turn in autumn. I had another beer. We talked about small towns which we both came from, about the lonliness of cities, about the granite cliffs of Acadia with the colors of September ascending in variegated layers up the hillside like redrock sandstone. I gave her my number, she swore she was coming to Maine in September, and Alex and I stumbled off to Fez where I drank black coffee with Myer's rum until closing time when we went for breakfast.

Needless to say I never heard from her, otherwise there wouldn't be a story in it. Moreover, on subsequent trips to the city I couldn't find the bar, or even pin down its location. It was near a corner, it was near a subway stop, it was across from the club... Brigadoon. Nor have I recovered my passage from Bly, despite my best efforts. With time I have come to doubt the existence of either one.

Italo Calvino writes in Invisible Cities of the crossroads bazaar city of Euphemia, where men come not only to trade silks and spices but memories as well, such that you depart the next morning with somebody else's recollections as vivid in your mind as if you had lived them, such that "your wolf will have become another wolf, your battle another battle, your sister another sister..." What he captures is the fungible nature of our own memories, our ability to believe in things that never were be they lines of verse or polished glasses on a barback.

The best bars, the most resonant poetry, the prettiest girls. They are never there when you go back to find them again.