I get onboard folded land in reference to nowhereTowns down down to the bottom of all places.The interglacial period finally terminates; the news comesOver. Ice ripples like slowmotion—oars carving water—until the Marlborough Sounds freeze over:Wet hair, or milky healing in great scars.Quickly the constellations are unrecognisableForests when every footstep is an evolutionary leap.Every day we need a leap second to keep hold : nowMany hundreds of kilometres North—on the stonesOf Hokianga, which means you have been thereBefore in a harbour earth oven—the supernova of Betelgeuse fliesBroad daylight . . . And Phobos strays too closeTo Mars’ gravity, mincing to Saturnine rings.Only one feastday, the full orbit of galactic centreCelebrated in those Saturnian days when Pangea reformedMountain oceans. I flicker down to the Southern FjordsWhere there is no more of this land,When exhausted land continues to fold on.    Last lastLast solar eclipse passes over sunbeds in Coromandel;Breakoff any chance left for plate tectonics, and“tables d’hôte” are set to the end of photosynthesis,As police raid immigrant multicellular life from apartmentsAt dawn. Old volcano Maungawhau was a gable beforeAny city unfurled on its blitzed shoulders.At summit I skip stones to the magnetic fieldSailing out of the Waitemata, shelling ozone . . . plough of Sun’sHabitable zone sweeps like suburban sprawl across,Away. Poles wander Mercurial, and thoughts begin to smokeAs the world puts itself at Venusian ease.But I’m let down as our galaxy fuses with Andromeda,As if nothing has changed; as if New Zealand is still The first to be seared by each calendar dawn.Still first in line for great gaps in the ground.
Dad was born in a basin in Whangarei and I lovedThe town sundial and the magnitude of seconds meansThere’s no need, let alone way, to divide the hours.I visit the house my parents sold, and I know the Moon& Earth might be tidelocked—turning onlythe same swollen face to one another—but right nowThere are other people inside doing things.Marsden Ave turns ninety-degrees to become Dominion RdWith frequency the same as amplitude so we don’tHave to do twice the work. At some unobserved early hourThe streetlamps begin to extinguish alongside the endOf starbirth, and we slip into the Sun in transparent darkWhen my neighbour Anne leans over the fence to askIf there are still vespers. As if I had known thatOur last night at home would beAt low tide with black holesThe last objects in the cosmos. On this timescale allMatter is instantaneous liquid, so even before I can nod homeThe rivulet of atoms—the last panning iron—turns offFrom a mountain source.My parents are goodnatured enough. They wouldn’t noticeThe eternal absorb just one more infinite; “the world” &“the Earth” slipping around on different frozen lakes.Now there is nothing it references all places.