"Please don't tell me to carry a map," Federico García Lorca wrote his parents from New York, while studying English at Columbia University and writing Poet in New York. "The map never helps me at all, it's useless. When it comes to maps, I have no sense of direction. When I trust my own instinct I reach my destination, but a map only leads me astray."

Avoiding abstraction, he might have said the same of time, and of the map of time known as the calendar. Never early, he often did things tarde pero a tiempo, late but just in time. As his brother Francisco observed, he expressed time as delay and as imminence, and like any lyric poet, he relished certain temporal adverbs: a number of the plays begin in the middle of things, with the adverb ya: already. He seldom dated letters or poems, but knew "how a city sings from November to November" (the title of one of his lectures) and when it was "autumn again," in New York or Madrid or Granada.

"A map is just impossible, at least for me," he wrote his parents after getting thoroughly lost in the city. "I can't seem to link its abstract lines with the living, noisy reality around me.

But I do perfectly well without it, better than most people do with their special maps. My spatial memory is amazing. Once I have been somewhere, I remember it always, and my friends can't believe it when we're on the elevated train at night, and you can hardly see anything, and I tell them, "We're going by Eighth Street." But this isn't at all strange in New York, which, as I told you before, is quite easy to figure out. You don't get lost very often, and if you do, you can pick up the thread immediately. What does cause problems is its size, and it is truly surprising how long it takes to get from one place to another."

"How long it takes . . . !" he writes. Not so in the virtual world, where one leaps in seconds from one end of Manhattan to the other, from the Upper West Side to the Battery, as we do now, tracing García Lorca's footsteps in the dust of an old map, sighting him here and there, then and now, during his nine-month sojourn in New York: chasing poetry with push pins.

Christopher Maurer