We begin from the cold mirror of Malanut Bay,
cleaving a celadon-green sea, heart-leapt, peering
into depths not known by sun, where a dorsal shadow
never dies.

Past Guri's wordless mouths, we round
the limestone caves defended by a wall of immemorial
trees, a silent stronghold of Pleistocene unconquered
by exhumers, yielding only to the patient adze of tides.

A fleet of jellyfish, trailing stingers, sweeps by us,
swimming with a billion forms in mute flow emerald
past seagrass garden, past shimmers of slivered light
on sand, while that prehistoric terror, stone-eyed, lies
beyond the bars, awaiting lovers of the caves.

but the day is right for all manner of dream and vessel

We have come to swim in ancestral waters, tease
monkeys at the entrance to the caverns, brace ourselves
for meeting lithe or just the lithic spirits of the vanished
race, if not the poorly imaged bats that hang off primal minds.

There strangely is tropic autumn on Lipuun's world's-end
cliff, but it is just the summer searing of the leaves revealing
the limestone skull tombs of the ages.
The maw is open-ended night, where guardian stones
are read like chronicles of wept years hardened upon
ground-rock on irreversible rock-whereas we all flow
past, like currents, or even swift of wings and feet,

but in the end mere bones much softer than
the monuments that rock and water build,
by drips, into blank columnar calendars.

At Ligang Cave, time halts, the ancients' time begins
embedded in overhangs invisible, whispered like
cathedral voices, deftly stirring in the midden heap
long swept of hidden shards incised with testaments,

entombed in secondary halls and passages through
darkness into light through upper darknesses
and chambered lights until we stand at Tabon Cave,
its gaze beyond all lands or seas, its mystery now fenced.

Of Paradise, there used to be but parables

There, among the layered clay, were lives unearthed
and measured, ways of knowing never fully known
except what we have learned of tools and routes.

Only theories live in Diwata Cave, no corpse remains,
a sheltering womb, cavity of coldness, one millionth
of a pyramid yet pulls upon the mind, urging one
to weave life from the clay and straw of everyday.

Down Igang Cave, the chill is that of catacomb.
Still we slide down into its gullet, despite dung scent
and vampire shadows hung on mythic walls.

We grope for traces of descent until, in Tadyaw Cave,
we witness aeons wed, stalactite to stalagmite

not marking time, time unbegun and will not end

and we are wombed within Manunggul Cave,
the secret port of Tabon's boats, for centuries in silence
moored, their star-fixated mariners rowing souls,
unaging dreams of happy forbears, to the sea which
lay beyond the edge of sky

even beyond the blinding sea of galaxies

Descending from the caves, we look out
for a weathered boat with a pair of oarsmen,
dark of skin, waiting for their fare.

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