<excerpts from tate's "the blue canyon"> 2006-08-16.2:26 p.m. excerpts from "The Blue Canyon" James Tate (for Fred Will) 1. The way you think of me, radio strangers to you. I wish I were departed "departed hastily" and never come back not even goodbye. Hair wandering over a book through the body causing real pain. The blue angel is of no use now with a terrible twist of the soul, the trees are bristling with sparks, I could still see the trees. To be something different like a brussels sprout it's as if we were ants so far away made of charcoal made of dust, good enough to erase and coming down if I had not grown up dissolving into the swan the way they think of me. from 3. this isn't even my chair, knives with arms. 6. Now decades are bowling pins for your perfumed revenge it chews bombs naturally only the world didn't change. Days passed like years with every song you sang, in a sensible array of tatters we smoked. And the swans, the swans are pasted together, the very sunset in halves hauntingly, I listened to what you were thinking about and thumped into a bottomless free fall. Get in bed and listen to the chicken's head again and again, our children the little ones, and the swans are ejected from the lake suddenly and without notice. First boil a mirror, then hurl a cow's eye at it, I broke the dark, gone my day is gone. 7. Now and for always I kneel down folded and stashed into high trees myrtle ashcan zebra everything I love. With perfect calm I entered your mouth has grown over on your meatball the angel drove the thin line between worlds. Almost, not quite, transparent who wants to die come here, finally blew all the circuits. With avenues of pleasure I am not responding to anything. Enough crying was not enough. I'm in the birdbath don't come in. back /& forth /& frosting names are often sad