I fell asleep in history
and when I woke up
I was still in history.
This wasn’t right.
It seemed to me I was out of history,
that history had run out,
that I was standing outside
and a slight, a-historical rain was falling
and I was cold because rain always makes me cold.
And the door to history
was behind me
and was closed
and if it wasn’t locked,
how would I ever know.
The rain was being written into the record books,
the record books that note everything the weather does,
if everything is how many inches fall
or from which cardinal direction and how fast
the wind blows
in a place where some human being is keeping track
but probably not jotting her name down by the observations.
If I should die in history while asleep
I will be stuck there,
I thought. On the other hand perhaps
history will go on thoroughly free of me
as I keep thinking it must be doing
right now.
I could live, I thought sleepily.
And history, what to make of it?