Time-cowled, pile of memory upon midden
beneath the silent laughter of constellations,
this land breathed fire, its amber eyes
lit up the western sea until the edge
of waters, spilling into the nether stars
beyond which lived dream-islanders.

The dwellers of these caves knew cycles well
like all beings at the planetary dawn,
knew motions, causes and effects, to whom
the galaxies were not strange apparitions
from another time or space, or universe.
Life, apart from adze, flake, vine and dream
was a wish for boats, to cross two mighty
seas, one led to the knife-edge of water world
the other to the cave of lights among the stars.

A sandbar leads from Tataran to Tabon Caves
invisible when the tide, aquamarine, is high,
at the ebb then rising like a gentle golden whale
on whose back a child may gather shells
a couple feel each other's secret pulse,
over which the ritual smile of each full moon
and star stream in jet-black night are seen.

There was once, in Pleistocene, a bridge
which must have brought the eden fauna
from beyond the Sunda straits, the dawn
of a sanctuary, and upon that bridge did Tabon's
beings-complex as the gods that gave them
the star maps for subsistence-bring memories
of race, hunt, art, a reverence for hearths, and
the science of the jars which bear them well
in their voyage through the afterlife.

There was also once a savant, his voice
an echo in the cavern fenced off now, hurtling
down the rock wall pierced by gnarled roots,
the echo reaching up the higher caverns
where the burial urns have disappeared,
replaced with signs that time and visitor forget,
the echo carrying us back to the first moment
of seas and islands, clouds and hills, the stars of
eve and morn, the pastel rise and set of that
enigma, the solitary sun.

And the echo
is caught by the wing flaps of the sea gull,
kingfisher, heron, tern, cave bat and quail,
echo of a life that tracked down messages on sooty walls and midden heaps, on bones
in jars whose lids bore watercraft and boatmen
rowing far beyond the spangled graveyard
of their departed stars.

At visit's end, in Brooke's Point, we saw
a boat with two Manunggul oarsmen slice
across a sun magenta on the Sulu Sea, halving
the world into spheres of cloud and water,
as quietly we drank a toast to the evening sky,
guardian over Tabon, and all the loves we keep.

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