It is warmer than usual here.
Alone in the stacks I pause to breathe,
Smell decades of musty journals
Dry, faint, like the breath of old men
Whose lives have here been gathered,
Trimmed, neatly bound, to be rifled
By the questing minds of strangers.

A woman in a light grey sweater
Leans intently over a page.
Her hair spills forward to frame her face
As she writes
Birthing ideas
Amid these dry relics of scholars innumerable.

Will my memento mori
Be lost on a library shelf,
Dust I am to dust returning
Until even the pages crumble?

© 1983