FINAL DESTINATION
There is,
In the heart of Phoenix,
A Catholic cemetery
That has grown three-fold
Since I knew it first.
Now there are hard cold graves
Where once I slept
In my own warm bed.
It is a fine and private place
In the cool dark night,
And there I did embrace
My own first love.
**********
There is,
In the desert town of Tombstone, Arizona,
Where Wyatt Earp shot it out
In the OK Corral,
A grave for cowboy Les Moore.
I stood at his Boot Heel grave
And read on his tombstone
That he was killed by three shots from a .44,
No less, no more.
**********
There is
South of San Francisco,
A Jewish cemetery.
It is there you will find Wyatt Earp,
Next to a Brooklyn Jewish actress
He called his own true love.
**********
There is,
In the heart of downstate Illinois,
An actual river,
Spoon River,
And near it is a small cemetery,
Peaceful, quiet, studded with trees.
You know the names
Carved on the tombstones.
You've read of their struggles,
Their hopes, their fears.
We stood over the grave
Of Lincoln's first love
And my name strummed his guitar.
We sang about their lives, their tears.
We'd driven half across the country
To reach those graves,
To the surprise of a passerby,
Unbelieving that the outside world
Knew who was buried in Spoon River.
**********
There is,
In the heart of Pittsburgh,
The steel town
A Northern town,
The grave of Stephen Foster,
Who sang about an Old Kentucky Home
He never owned,
A Suwanee River he never saw,
And who never came from Alabama
With a banjo on his knee.
I stood alone over his grave,
On the anniversary of his death,
And placed a flag on it to mark it well.
**********
There is,
In Elmira,
In upstate New York,
The grave of Mark Twain,
Who did come from the South,
Who knew the Mississippi River well,
And who wrote each day in a shack.
I sat at his desk in his shack,
And on his grave I left a stone in homage.
**********
There is,
In Cambridge,
In a churchyard
Next to Harvard Square,
An old Colonial graveyard
With ancient tilting tombstones
Upon which rain and wind and time
Have erased the dates and names.
I stood among them
At sundown
And pondered the long shadows
Those tilting tombstones
Cast upon the snow.
**********
And there is,
In Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery
The grave of Tammany Hall's Boss Tweed,
Leonard Bernstein, Basquiat,
And six hundred thousand more.
There is also a mausoleum of stone,
The final destination
Of an obscure life.
Above the doorway
Are chiseled these words:
"Good Enough."
