Final Destination

 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."