Break of Day

You recall Lewis Carroll’s Alice, the White Queen’s “six impossible things” before breakfast. So: hold the eggs ’n’ toast, that bowl of granola! Before even a sip of coffee, try just one impossible thing: no words from or about Donald Trump. “I hear America singing,” Whitman wrote, Trump’s runnings of the mouth not having entered his ears.

Here, before breakfast it’s between darkness and sunrise. Earth having turned “its other cheek to the luminary,” as Joseph Brodsky put it. Neither day nor night: twilight comin’ round. Twilight—astronomical / nautical / civil. Sun inchworming its way up toward the horizon. Again, finally, less than eighteen degrees below.

Waning gibbous moon. Jupiter and Mars clinging to each other in the southeast.

On the beach, tide rising. Barely perceptible, a large form in the shore break. Clarifying as not pinniped but octopod: two lovers superglued, at least as well “clung” as Jupiter and Mars. Under the influence, however, of Venus. Legs / arms round waists / shoulders. In the sea of love: drowning, or not. In this half-light, their dyad generic. Archetypal, at least as far back as Zeus-the-bull carrying off Europa.

On the nearby seawall, having to make do without what’s keeping the couple warm, a fisherman squirms into full wetsuit. Sex over there, speargun & camouflage here. Love ’n’ death.

Death. Too early for the occasional individual carrying a canister: ashes to strew, lei to place on the face of the deep.

Life ongoing, nearly time for dawn-patrol surfers. Too soon, however, for thong-bikinied preteens with smartphones. Posing, sharing, laughing, (re) posing. Again. And again. “Uncle,” the local girls sometimes say to me, “uncle, can you take our picture?”

People rise early in the northern tropics. Just mauka—inland—of these shoreline buildings, it’s not quite the moment for caregivers changing shifts; for walkers and joggers; for ear-splitting two-stroke leaf blowers in Sisyphean battle with trade winds; for tourist helicopters. Still too soon for swarms of “self-balancing personal transporters” carrying “visitors” eager to see everything. Everything, that is, unless it means having to be on foot.

Early. Police siren, garbage truck, moped. Van backup beeper. Roosters crowing. Dogs barking.

Dogs: from my childhood, legendary St. Bernards rescuing humans in the Alps. Lassie, the television collie. Buck, in Jack London’s The Call of the Wild. Our hapless family boxer.

In my twenties, I cared for a friend’s marvelous, intelligent German shepherd for a year while she was traveling. And, spending time on sheep ranches, came to greatly admire border collies herding sheep.

That was then. But here, this morning? Homeowners seemingly pleased their proxies yap as they themselves surely would, if only...

“If dogs run free, why can’t we?” Dylan sang. These particular dogs suffering from SDS, Small Dog Syndrome. Or, worse, VSDS, Very Small Dog Syndrome.

But right here, no member of “we” tethered to beloved family member. No human standing—idle; entranced?—in pre-defecation holding pattern. Thence to stoop & scoop, plastic-bagging “solid waste.” Which may resolve hoary arguments about what’s distinctively human.

Language? Chins? Bipedalism? Duping oneself? Plastic-bagging another species’ shit?

Here in Honolulu, forty years of having to clean up after your dog. Human-invented plastic for the task, and what can replace it? Plastic bags in its stomach, a pilot whale is unable to eat and, finally, unable to breathe. Plastic bags for whales, micro-or nanoplastics in food for us. “Single-use” plastic bags soon to be banned? Dog owners stockpiling.

But what about human-canine symbiosis? Interspecies bonding. Actual living-and-breathing Nature, albeit tethered. At hand. In hand.

Twenty-first-century urban life: dog on leash locates a familiar spot; deems fragrances and textures underfoot benign; or, some say, aligns itself with the north / south axis of the magnetic poles like migrating birds. (Your dog circles before sleep, round and round. Why? To get its back to the wind, though. . .in your living room, there’s no wind.)

But at ground zero—the tree lawn—Fido-faithful squats back on rear legs, butt down. Looks off to the side as...