It is 10:21 in Wellington a Thursday

last day on Fulbright’s payroll, ticket

to fly out on Saturday the 8:30 to Auckland that is if

Air New Zealand will bully past the ash

plume, volcanoes the only smokers in my poems.

In Moore Wilson’s I buy horopito for Atin and Tinni

and spend my last token in Unity on Jenny Bornholdt’s

The Rocky Shore, deciding that I want to write

about poetic conversations maybe instead of having them.

 

I stroll through a cloud on Kelburn Parade

and get out of the spit and wind into Murphy

where I can count tuatara for the second to last time

as Harry taught me, but red heat-lamps warm

blank rocks, the reptiles are hiding, it’s June

in a southerly for Chrissake. Bad omen.

 

Anna’s Thicket, advance copy’s woven shade,

is light in my pocket, most of it second-person

and italic gesticulation, that’s what I like about it,

that and the bits about sad teenagers and feeling

middle-of-the-wood (we’re older than Frank O’Hara

ever got) and her in-the-know references to evade

Americans though I could level a few guesses—

dedications, that’s another post, because this blog

does have a northern hemisphere future, probably after

two weeks in Hawai’i baking the creases

out of my forehead from packing selling cars and

 

saying goodbye to too many people, who goes

with Fergus now not me, no more flat white with Annemarie,

Bernadette’s in Australia I hear, Lex Luthor alias

Jonathan retreats to his icy lair on Mount Victoria,

no more books to trade with Rob or information

with Alice soon to be shrunk hehe to her cackle on FB,

still breathing, Frank, and listening, but for love

of you and some others, omitting terminal punctuation