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"Like one, that on a lonesome road

Doth walk in fear and dread,

And having once turned round walks on,

And turns no more his head;

Because he knows, a frightful fiend

Doth close behind him tread."

---Samuel Coleridge, Rime Of The Ancient Mariner

In that abandoned cemetery---

full before the township lines had been surveyed;

before the state had been constituted from this

rather extensively unsettled territory---

many of the headstones have fallen over;

those that still stand, badly weathered, are

illegible, or have been covered by that strange moss

that sometimes seems irradiated with an

eerie, tremoulous glow that does not seem quite

earthy.  Only noxious weeds thrive here; and

during three of the year's four seasons, the soil is

covered by the damp, detritus of last year's fallen

autumn leaves.  On most evenings, no cars

travel this narrow, twsting, rural road:  the

few really living, and the more numerous partly living,

reside elsewhere.  I do not know what manner of

process makes me aware of your rising out of that

haunted, oblong crevice that was dug there, for you;

but you do emerge---and, no matter how often, your

tentative steps are clumsy, shambling stumbles, more

awkward than a besotted cousin's, and more horrifying.

Your bent arms flail, and your twisted fingers clutch, at the

air---as if grasping for a perch, or reaching for prey.  Thus, in

such condition you make your way, through the broken,

rusted, wrought-iron gate---imported from the former

mother country, they say---and toward this very spot where,

watching you, even over considerable distance, I am

transfixed, immobilized, by fear

becoming terror, becoming horror as, with your

inevitable determination, you draw near.  Clouds part---but,

somehow behind the gibbous moon they still blot out the

stars---so that shimmering light illumines only you; and, in the

sepulchral silence that accompanies your approach toward me---as

those rotted remains of human hands succeed in their reach to

clutch at me, I see---with a loathing as deep as the abyss of

Hell itself---myself revisioned in the decomposing features of

what was once your face; and the gutteral, gasping voice that

emerges from your twisted mouth with its dislocated jaw, informs

me, with a sound of supreme triumph, that I am your soul, that

I have been you and can never be other than you; and that

you have come, once again, to claim and retrieve me, and that I

must be yours, joined to you in your grave . . . to which you long to

return . . .

forever . . . .