Memorizing poetry is the act of devoting yourself to an art that few people practice anymore. It’s impractical and unnecessary: why do so when you can just look it up? Why remember anything for that matter since most things are available to us with the learned gesture of a finger flick?

Perhaps the best reason is love. Once glued to your heart a poem becomes something you can relate to more deeply. The words have a chance to resonate and transform as you carry them alongside the rhythm of the days and seasons, as you yourself contort, distort, shrink, and grow. They, and you, can become something more.

For instance: one day you may wake up with lower back pain and an irritable mood, rendering the scene of your morning walk a mass of hazy sensations. Faces are blurry, sunlight is an obstruction, every damn dog a damn dog. But something about your crooked strut, the way you circle the same path around the park as runners fly by, brings to mind Rilke:

I live my life in widening circles

that reach out across the world.

I may not complete this last one,

but I give myself to it.

_

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.

I’ve been circling for thousands of years

and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,

a storm, or a great song?

Slightly more alert now wakes your body. Your eyes turn toward the familiar mosque overhead. It’s the tower you daily patrol like a sentinel, usually half-asleep. The smooth, frictionless surface of its crown reminds you of the Pyrenees mountains, which overlook and protect the small town of Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port. Those five long weeks are in the past. Your feet were once there. But always you’ve circled the same tower seeking logos, God. Still they are with you now, guiding your footsteps. It’s the lines bring you forward and back.

The trio and their three pups you’ve double-rounded take on a different quality. One of the dogs has arthritis. His weight is being watched. A trail of tiredness stems from their voices like a faint perfume. The tail though continues to wag. His bark keeps at bay a creature who never forgets the song of Spring in search of its seed. Was it they who took care of the pups, or has it always been the other way around?

Back in your small apartment you open the curtains and lie down. Cloudless skies fill the quarter-top of your vision. Falling asleep again—and then the coo of a morning dove. Is she grieving the arthritic dog, or his human companions who have always known loss? You get up and cradle it in your attention, knowing that this alone may not be enough. How lovely the inky stars on its back are, almost as dark as its probing eyes. She flies off from the porch to sit with her friend on the nearby wire. Slowly before you the scene rearranges itself, rearranges your mind. And then—perhaps it is more:

Spring is like a perhaps hand

(which comes carefully

out of Nowhere)arranging

a window,into which people look(while

people stare

arranging and changing placing

carefully there a strange

thing and a known thing here)and

_

hanging everything carefully

_

spring is like a perhaps

Hand in a window

(carefully to

and fro moving New and

Old things,while

people stare carefully

moving a perhaps

fraction of flower here placing

an inch of air there)and

without breaking anything.

This one you had to look up. Strange placement of punctuation marks, rhymes tucked away like the hidden buds of a virgin flower, every line so full of meaning, the texture of the whole subtle and delicate and refreshing. Welcome is the retreat of winter. But already you miss it, here lingering in the subliminal. e.e. cummings brings you back, helps you linger a little longer. Your heart opens again; you find more room to graft into your chambers another poem. The next day you go out and circle the tower, listening, waiting to be softly rearranged.