Emily Dickinson

David Lee Garrison

She loves to rhyme the Latinates,
like immortality,
and blend them with a homely phrase
in gravid symmetry.

She matches words that share one sound,
like God with could and cried;
she hears the buzzing of a fly
that her own death confides.

She dreams of strolling on a moor
that she has never seen,
and smells the purple of the heather
hidden by the sheen.

She challenges those platitudes
time hands us down as given,
and seeks instead a slanted truth—
the shifting light of heaven.

She wanders our imaginations,
gowned in ashen white,
and whispers lines of poetry
that haunt each page of night.