Elision

by Dan Murphy

They laid out the body of Lincoln
who had dreamt thus
lying prone ten days before
next to a loveless wife

his Lexington duchess
who slept stiff on her back
with arms folded in an X

dreamless and severe
There was no place
on the bed for Abraham
overwhelmed with 4 a.m. Melancholy

no side where waves
of nausea could not reach
a man so longing for sleep

in the long wait for dawn
as Emily Dickinson
300 miles North
stuffed poems in a sidedrawer

her chamber rattling
with spirits and elongated hyphens
agitating a raincloud

to rustle its skirts across
a Presbyterian meadow
then meander in 4 or 5 years
800 poems

in the time of war
over American soil
cut with blade and brick wall

and farmland littered
with bone and shell
and unburied corpses
poem after poem

her daily devotions
of capitalization and awe
our sexless mother

wrote her life
picking shadow from glare
from speckled window
like a small bird

wreaking havoc with little blessings
an ascetic protest of verse
hidden or held back

tapping under the skull in dream
a great passage over water
in boat or Union jacket
the skirt billowing out

as limbs shiver and cramp
that night sleep pierced the back
of our saint president’s head

resting on an overturned pillow
and he saw the mourner’s slow
tears roll and the second line
of drum, fiddle and fife

marching single file
up Pennsylvania Avenue
and someone a beardless doctor

leaning over Saint Abraham
touched the eyes
sometime in April
to close them for sleep