I get onboard folded land in reference to nowhere

Towns down down to the bottom of all places.

The interglacial period finally terminates; the news comes

Over. 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 unrecognisable

Forests when every footstep is an evolutionary leap.

Every day we need a leap second to keep hold : now

Many hundreds of kilometres North—on the stones

Of Hokianga, which means you have been there

Before in a harbour earth oven

—the supernova of Betelgeuse flies

Broad daylight . . . And Phobos strays too close

To Mars’ gravity, mincing to Saturnine rings.

Only one feastday, the full orbit of galactic centre

Celebrated in those Saturnian days when Pangea reformed

Mountain oceans. I flicker down to the Southern Fjords

Where there is no more of this land,

When exhausted land continues to fold on.    Last last

Last 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 apartments

At dawn. Old volcano Maungawhau was a gable before

Any city unfurled on its blitzed shoulders.

At summit I skip stones to the magnetic field

Sailing out of the Waitemata, shelling ozone . . . plough of Sun’s

Habitable zone sweeps like suburban sprawl across,

Away. Poles wander Mercurial, and thoughts begin to smoke

As 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 loved

The town sundial and the magnitude of seconds means

There’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 only

the same swollen face to one another—but right now

There are other people inside doing things.

Marsden Ave turns ninety-degrees to become Dominion Rd

With frequency the same as amplitude so we don’t

Have to do twice the work. At some unobserved early hour

The streetlamps begin to extinguish alongside the end

Of starbirth, and we slip into the Sun in transparent dark

When my neighbour Anne leans over the fence to ask

If there are still vespers. As if I had known that

Our last night at home would be

At low tide with black holes

The last objects in the cosmos. On this timescale all

Matter is instantaneous liquid, so even before I can nod home

The rivulet of atoms—the last panning iron—turns off

From a mountain source.

My parents are goodnatured enough. They wouldn’t notice

The eternal absorb just one more infinite; “the world” &

“the Earth” slipping around on different frozen lakes.

Now there is nothing it references all places.