Cemetery Hill

19th century boom town boneyard being assimilated by its surroundings. The left side row of sage brush and stone piles represent some of the many now unmarked graves. The collapsing fences and built up sone area are the high rent graves.

A bit of a nascent, fantastical story to go with as well?

Under the dusty dry and dreary sky
A handful of sweating, swearing gravediggers for hire
Hacked me out a half-ass hole in one bloody hell of rocky hill
And now, forevermore, agitated and aimless i lie
No soothing psalms, no posies in passing, no lament on a lyre
I had long ago stopped given' a good goddamn when alive
Never did i imagine the extent of empty, endless apathy when i did die
No wonder that the pagans opt for the certainty of the pyre

There is a perversion to all familiar poetry when you end up planted in paupers row in so misbegotten a boneyard. Particularly one a cut below the rest in which even the typical conventions have from the beginning been out of hand dismissed. When the rough and tumbles establish the town, they pay little heed to the well mannered machinations of polite, established society when it comes to anything, to include putting their expired and dispatched down. No society cemetery with an auxiliary outcast's boot hill here -- it is not Boston; but gold country after all. The hell-bound and the hallowed, the high hats and saloon hangers-on recline cheek by jowl, head to toe, row beside row. A few RIP in memoriam, most of them history may nevermore know. The comely young Mother of 19 done in before her time by bad winter, malnutrition, a dearth of medicine, and the burden of unattended child birth in a place where barkeeps were held in higher esteem than sawbones, even the drunken ones. Her baby beside her in eternal empty embrace, a hanged mail coach hijacker and destitute barfly listed only as "Unknown" there for company in eternal slumber in an aisle a foot away from her face. Many a countless incongruity to this final resting place of stone strewn ground. One thing for sure, no matter who the gravediggers were tasked to sling down at any time of the year --- they asked not who you were if you could manage the fare; peacefully dead in your sleep, stiff as a stick from the strychnine after one too many a long depressing winter, died of indeterminate causes out in the middle of a muddy street, found by the railhead freighter out on the prairie with an empty purse and lifted hair, for they rested assured the job of hollowing out a hole where you mortal remains could be humped up the hill and expiditously dumped in, it was always certain to be, for them, likely for you and your next of kin, one damned, dirty son of a bitch as they always snarlingly said while liquid limbering up for the labor and the load down at Tanner's without so much as a beg your pardon excuse my french to be muttered to mitigate their ill manners. The headstones are few, the the wooden markers number not many more, the telltale mounds in the ghostly, overgrown grounds entirely unmarked by more than a struggling sagebrush are the most plenty. The roughest hewn stone memorial in the place ironically pointing the plot where a murdered mason doth lie. Now a century and some on, the plot pickets crumble and effortlessly come down. The cattle barely at bay on the opposite side a collapsing boundary fence. The rattle snakes the only frequent visitors to the vista a few ridges above and beyond its long abandoned tin pan town -- do these creepy crawlers come to taunt or pay tribute to these long ago dead -- maybe,or maybe not departed, they just have not said. Woe be he who paid the slick speaking undertaker that added a premium of so very hard to come by coin for a solemn, sacred promise of perpetual care upon planting. Twas not an instant before he too occupy a seedy site there among them to whom he swore the oath over a bible on the windswept knob keeping silent, long forgotten vigil over that devil damned territorial mining town.

It seemed not a moment in the measure of time as reckoned by the scale of gold prospecting camps that come and go like the bitterroot blooms between that first introduction when i stumbled upon and eventually,hesitatingly crept past this forlorn space on that painfully frigid forty below, middle of a full moon January night -- after an introspective pause, to ponder and postulate with a an unbelieving shake of my head at how i would never care to permanently keep company here and the subsequent time when i was lowly brought down and dragged so very unceremoniously to a more or less place of individual dishonor in the same somber surroundings. Carefully i wished for not ending up here, yet here i have ended still on this barren, bone-dry hill. Now, here i have very long lain. Anchored and enslaved here in perhaps the most unusual tomb in the territory, my unpredicted stay in the detestable, unhallowed hole has come to more than a hundred and a half years and counting since she saw me put here and also saw to it that without her say so i would thus stay and nevermore move. Languishing in a conditon somewhere west of purgatory, a bit over the border from perdition in lone grave away, but not out of sight in the most prominent corner of the cemetery from all the corpse community of others. A most honorary plot, and a buffer of many others, purchased with purpose at a premium -- as if she were seeing to the final arrangements of an exalted chinese emperor, not the low down dirty dog drifter i had come to be in her eyes. The most spartan, nondescript grave distinguished by the very finest of handcrafted, ornate wooden marker made in a most unusual manner and out of some very strange tree that seems as if it will never shrink, lack luster, nor rot. Quite unlike the underlying resident. Quite like all the other wooden monuments in the cemetery in the respect that not a word of identification or remembrance of who beneath it lay -- though quite different in its way, for in this particular case it came fresh by design back on that distant, dread, dismal day just exactly like that rather than slowly, surely having honestly come by it having been worn down and worn off by the sun, the wind, and the rain -- now these have been relegated to being mere memorials to the nature of decay rather than those underneath, the long gone gold seekers and associates who once wandered this way. The madness of her method intended that the distinguished corner location always be remembered, the despised departed that she condemned to this cold, ebony eternity and entombed a strictly regulation six feet down when the depths of all other graves here had been cheated shallow by an inconstant bit. The loathesome interred, by contrast, never to be recognized, recounted or recalled. Even the contemptibly corrupt clique of cold blooded criminals a stone's throw away who were sent on their journey to eternity by a good drop from the gallows adjacent to the cemetery en masse by the Vigilance Committee at least had an inscription of "3-7-77" on their rough hewn marker boards to act as a public service reminder of the nature of who might be buried below.

There is one other small matter of other possible note, some say concern, to that nameless grave marker called mine. Like legendary Excaliber lodged in the ancient adamant stone; a finely honed, ghastly glistening straight razor with an ever untarnished blade is there imbedded and protruding all the way through that unknown wood like the sword of Damocles dangling in deadly demonstration over my moldering head. A cruel cutting implement gargoyle that none has ever been able to budge or remove no matter how hard they have tried; and Oh ho, how the latter day henny-pennies who had moved into the dying mine town did beg and beseech many a stalwart and strapping young beau to try -- for when the refined mourners once still came to the burial ground for services, even off in that corner a respectable distance away how the sight of this macabre monument murder did give the solemnly gathered the creeps and for innumerable nights following deeply disturbed their sleeps. So much the more so when on that anniversary every year, at precisely thirteen minutes past four in the morning, the gash in a gnarled knot of the grain where the razor so sinisterly stuck started to bleed -- a compulsory, involuntary stigmatic sign of the end to the means when murder and sorcery mix. Soon all those local resident rattle tailed vipers as if on lucifer's own command came a'crawlin' from out of the brush and began to gather to feast on this eerie elixir of way after witching hour sanguine mead; which, to date, has not proved enough of a blood banquet to sate the beast. Thus, annually, the reunion dinner still goes on. At first, in the years so many after she saw me planted, a solitary, corporeal, cloaked and veiled ethereal Lass gliding through the boneyard gates and straight on to my grave. A handsome colleen who steadily progressed from vibrance of youth, through elegant dignity of maturity, to honored elder by decree of old age would also on cue make a mandatory pilgrimage from where she had migrated after the death of the town and appear to celebrate the abhorrent anniversary. She would slouch unceremoniously upon my marker, stare off into the anticipated dark dwindling to dawn -- or was it the abyss, drink a glass of fine, rare wine and smoke her personal, unique, exotic, handmade cigar as ravenous, rapacious rattlesnakes slithered and slurped the sanguinary substance all about her feet. The black blood flowing, pooling, and soaking into a destiny of plain dirt just as it had where once i did lie with a Lady's cherished, now sacrificed razor lodged fast in my liver while my vital life essence oozed unrelentingly out onto the boardwalk, over the edge, and onto the smut of street in front of the most well appointed and modern frame house among the prevalent clapboard shacks and rough hacked cabins on the main street of a rich and raucous mining boom town. Ah, but i regress. Being so long deceased has made my once focused mind prone to wander. All of that now irrelevant excitement and intrigue was back when i was alive.

Then always at the exact time when the clods were originally about to be thrown back over me at that unremembered far past funeral, She straightens up, stands, smirks in response to some unspoken recollection she holds on hard to inside, swirls and swills the last dregs of her glass round and round in her mouth and all over my decrepit dead bones she spits and then viciously spits a chaser of vitriol for me to enjoy with the last of the once over wine. Her oft invoked curse that has kept me shackled in this crypt before casting another emptied ritual chalice of expensive, hand made crystal after another to shatter over the rocks down the reptile residence side of cemetery hill at the first rays of light -- just past five. Of course just as my own had not, neither did the Lady's ultimate death also not us do part for now when she visits in company of coldblooded venomous pit vipers for the annual passage rite, her's is now as theirs, when the still vexing Visage vague, manifests for it is the ghost of my vengeful crypt keeper who comes to contemplate, commemorate, and curse. Never yet to reconcile or communicate.