After Johnny Carson’s Final Appearance on 'The Tonight Show' by Andrew Feld

"Democracy is the eagle on the back of a dollar bill, with 13 arrows
in one claw, 13 leaves on a branch, 13 tail feathers, and 13 stars
over its head. This signifies that when the white man came to this
country, it was bad luck for the Indians, bad luck for the trees,
bad luck for the wildlife, and lights out for the American Eagle."
-- Johnny Carson, September 11, 1991

There is always some darkness hidden inside the light.
No matter how bright the klieg, the spot, the house --
still some spot, shadow, wisp or stain.
It is well known that even on the sun there are shadows.

I have talked my whole life as if talking were a kind of light.
I opened my mouth and from behind the shadow of my face
streamed out the kind of conversation they call light --
barbed quips, banter, innuendo, mock seriousness. Jokes.

With my last breath I will insist that I was generous
with my light. I gave it to you, my guests,
so we could build between us, out of the silver stain
in your shut eyes after the bulb’s flash, a Mylar balloon

filled with your good night breath rising like a sigh
above the grease and gravies, the coffees and highballs
of your day all clean and reflective, a mirror in which
you stop the throat of the woman you are with your penis.

It was never as easy as it looked. There was a cost.
To give you that, I had to kill my self. At first I was afraid --
how terrible, I thought, to be a man with no self.
I couldn’t do it. I sat in my dark canyon and measured

my ambitions against my abilities as rain cast its feelers
against my picture windows and the distant traffic
sighed in its famous imitation of Whitman’s dark mother.
For the first and last time I looked deep in my heart

and in that bleak scrutiny the child dissolved, weeping.
Among the many things the child weeps for in his
unfathomable self-pity is his lost silver balloon. That
and, you know -- America. America, it is my pleasure

to give you back your silver balloon. Please don't lose it again.

Each Kept by Glyn Maxwell

Each kept
a spotlight. Light was nowhere else. One tear
of concentrated sun as if the sun
were little as it looks, and the idea
that things are bigger closer just some dumb
stuff we think.
Their sense of what they’d done
together stayed enormous, near, far,
among new people now, among no one,
and, when it wasn’t there, like the black star
it is, each kept a memory that trembled
homeward like a taper.
Not the same
memory (that was taken from them now)
but two bright stills, twin captures that resembled
each other and, if blinked at in a frame,
would blur and flicker, animate somehow.