My E.E. Cummings book 100 selected poems,
purchased at the college bookstore nearly 50 years on,
has a scrap of paper left along the way to
bring me back to poem number 54,
which concludes
“I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance”
and again,
like the first hundred times I read it,
I caught my breath in wonder.
