A Line of Sand

Every morning when the sun comes up on Kailua beach, I feel like I’m the only person watching. It’s a spectacle for one person. I have to celebrate it. I’ve written dozens of poems about it. I don’t know which of them fully captures the drama. It feels like the giant dioramas of the Hudson River School: Bierstadt’s Domes of the Yosemites, F. W. Church’s Niagra, or The Heart of the Andes, except of course it stretches from horizon to horizon. It’s the original.

Through the molten sky, silver draining through the sprue, the funnel, of the palm fronds like liquid ore, the dawn sea travels through the smelting furnace of the bay to mold sastrugi ominously on the sand.

We live on the island of the damned, on the edge of oblivion, like any distant planet outpost, or Jules Verne’s Sargasso Sea. We live on the margins of Caspar David Friedrich’s The Sea of Ice, except the frozen upthrusts don’t hide shipwrecks. Here, the waves are frozen by the dawn light, and the threat comes from the sheer infinity of the sea. There’s nothing between us and Alaska. We esteem the sheet of flat sea, the vast calm of the blue-green lagoon, but we realize that its monstrous serenity hides subterranean ridges, jagged flumes, volcanic chains, which will eventually rise up and inundate all of us. Maybe just not today. There’s time for one more dawn.

It’s a science fiction setting, but it’s entirely real, as are the distant threats.

The keys are cays, but also computer keys. The morning hand is the line of sand, a poem. The molten lead that runs through the printing press channels makes a book. But the lines that are formed with such indestructible metals are made of sand, and transient.

April 19th, 2026, Kaiholu