Thanks to poet Gary Margolis for sharing this library-related poem.

Work Study

Memory requests a title from the closed
stacks. An exchange student is sent
into the basement to retrieve an available book.
Downstairs he remembers he saw a couple

of co-eds making love in their end-of-semester
carrel. They didn’t look up. Never asked
if he wrote his mother in Ethiopia. They just
kept going at it. A phrase he learned

in his ESL class. Perhaps one day he’d recall
in his home-at-last house. Retrieve a fact
he learned for a test. Memories aren’t stored
like books. What we feel and smell and see,

what we touch, chapters it wouldn’t be wrong
to say, kept separately in the brain’s foreign
places. Experienced pieces of love and near-love.
We can retrieve if we remember to ask. Even

when they’re found where they’re supposed to be.
Next to another story, a text, an oversized
compendium of maps. And carried, close to the chest,
floor by floor, up to the circulation desk.

-Gary Margolis