Perhaps She Was a Collector

On Halloween, workers dug up a headstone in Emily Dickinson's front yard.

But exactly what Gen. Thomas Gilbert's headstone was doing under 18 inches of dirt in Dickinson's front yard has some experts stumped -- especially knowing his remains are buried in a nearby cemetery with a more ornate grave marker.

"What do you do with a used gravestone?" asked Jane Wald, the museum's executive director. "It might have been used as a step or used to cover a hole in the ground. We don't know exactly why it was placed there." [Link]

This might explain that poem of hers that begins

THE DISTANCE that the dead have gone
  Does not at first appear;
Their coming back seems possible
  For many an ardent year.