Queens Cemetery, Setting Sun

Airport bus from JFK
cruising through Queens
passing huge endless cemetery 
by Long Island’s old expressway
(once a dirt path for wheelless Indians) 
myriad small tombstones tilted up 
gesturing statues on parapets 
stone arms or wings upraised 
lost among illegible inscriptions 
And the setting yellow sun
painting all of them
on one side only
with an ochre brush
Rows and rows and rows and rows 
of small stone slabs
tilted toward the sun forever 
While on the far horizon
Mannahatta’s great stone slabs 
skyscraper tombs and parapets 
casting their own long black shadows 
over all these long-haired graves 
the final restless places
of old-country potato farmers 
dustbin pawnbrokers
dead dagos and Dublin bouncers 
tinsmiths and blacksmiths and roofers 
house painters and house carpenters 
cabinet makers and cigar makers 
garment workers and streetcar motormen 
railroad switchmen and signal salesmen 
swabbers and sweepers and swampers 
steam-fitters and key-punch operators 
ward heelers and labor organizers 
railroad dicks and smalltime mafiosi 
shopkeepers and saloon keepers and doormen
icemen and middlemen and conmen 
housekeepers and housewives and dowagers 
French housemaids and Swedish cooks 
Brooklyn barmaids and Bronxville butlers 
opera singers and gandy dancers 
pitchers and catchers
in the days of ragtime baseball 
poolroom hustlers and fight promoters 
Catholic sisters of charity 
parish priests and Irish cops 
Viennese doctors of delirium 
now all abandoned in eternity 
parcels in a dead-letter office 
inscrutable addresses on them 
beyond further deliverance 
in an America wheeling past them 
and disappearing oblivious 
into East River’s echoing tunnels 
down the great American drain