The Harrier Suite

1

‘She must originally have bought
the potassium cyanide
as a sort of aesthetic caprice, the way

she kept a skull on her dresser
as a young girl.’ (Thomas Mann
on the suicide of his sister, Carla.)

But you misunderstand:
your senses merely paraphrase
a translucent day, an opaque night;

too concerned to compose
an account, you take no account
of translucence, of opacity

because you want to own
you cannot own another, the other,
or the dust it will all come to

but for the harrier, your subject.

2

The harrier does not enter
space as if it was theatre.
Its fictions are indelicate;
it does not regard
your narcissism, that of your father
as either moral or immoral.

Sometimes the male
dives on the female, forcing her to roll
over and present her claws . . .

3

He drew the bedclothes
back to view my breasts:
I was frightened but he never grew
tired, I was his
Easter.

The harrier sees prophecy as parody
and relies on carrion:
‘I saw my self seeing
my self, smelling her
kelpie sex and sulphur . . . ’

4

As peripatetic emperor the harrier rules
wherever: its subject
itself,

the river it follows
follows reformist policies, undermining
the bridge’s foundations

while critics hurry over
from the known to the unknown,
out of their depth.

5

A commercial traveller
your breath is never
immaterial: you

exhale and take essence
towards substance. The harrier
emancipates day from night,

rising through silence like
a question. Instead of.
And you belong to that ‘of’.

6

this glasshouse is a map of the world curling around the poles: America a perennial at the centre New Zealand floats in a styrofoam tray

this glasshouse is tactile light it fuses the sky with the hue of the star-spangled banner when the long white cloud clears

      the harrier is there