the calliope floats up and down the river
the tinkling sounds from the pipe organ play:
“does eat oats,
and mares eat oats,
and little lambs eat ivy-
a kid’ll eat ivy too,
wouldn’t you?”
this cheers me up and creeps me out simultaneously.
last night i dreamt of being a refugee,
a new identity in my fake passport
a nod to the soldier on the train
and we’re racing across upper mongolia
the landscape fleeting in my peripheral
heart choking adrenaline- fear, and elation.
all this from falling asleep with book in hand,
about olga, the revolutionary beauty,
who was sent by muller, when seven months pregnant
to hitler as a “gift”..
she died at 33, in the gas chambers at bernburg,
in february of 1942..
all these individual lives,
part and parcel of the greater picture,
the one that comes into my sleep at night,
transforms me into these characters, real people
other stories, and i wake with fleeting images
of travel and faces,
places and people and pasts
i’ll never know.