By GÉMINO H. ABAD

Our instincts on holiday urged a walk
through the countryside, a brief jungle trek
as lightsome quest to fill a vacant hour.
No, we didn’t think that bruited marvel,
cliff’s fall of waters pouring from the sun!
was too far to walk or too hid to find—
we were no longer young, my wife and I,
and worried about our boys though they are
as sure-footed and spry as mountain goats.

Resting awhile in a wild little glade
throbbing with the noonday whirr of crickets,
we quenched our thirst with bottled sun-warmed Sprite.
With shouts as to dare the encroaching woods,
our boys leaped to the clearing’s sunlit edge
—the mountain received them without a sound!
I sprang after them, and gripped my wife’s hand
as the sun blanked her sight where her heart dropped,
Oh, where?—Our boys had found their hearts’ mountain!

But we who knew danger and kept her speech,
must track that sheer drop without syllable,
foot to crevice, hand to vine, butt to earth,
eyes yearning to see the roaring waters
of her text—in full flood, naked to view,
in the vast sounding wilderness around.

Ai, here is no time, and the sun hangs fire—
and we are lost, and cannot ever speak.
Our hearts cry fear in the desolate woods
fraught with accident, and cry, Where is God?
or His hand, if bush to grip free its root
or vine to cling to grow a row of thorns.
O, how far down our cliff yet? a rumor
of waters drifts up to taunt our hearing
as we hang from the crumbly slope and slide
our bodies down the trail that slips and twists
like a coil of gut through the tangled shrubs;
any loose rock may suddenly cry out
and rain down stones and earth at last to break
the stillness made the tangled forests wild
and the cliffs hang sheer.
Our bodies pressed so
to earth must sense the weird geometries
of breath and sweaty grip, postulating
in grime a sudden precipice to flesh.

Through the jumble of fern and thorny vine,
we glimpse a shimmer of stream far below,
tumble of rocks like rugged cuneiform
to the dead tumult of the mountain’s birth.
The falls sound everywhere her murmurous
thunder, but invisible, cascading
without alphabet through the heave of trees
and fall of vines; amid the surge and roar
of waters, the derelict boulders seem
to fill the tidal caverns of her sound.

Our boys wait a long time for us, laughing
wet and bold on the stream’s tilting boulders;
the waters swirl barbaric round their feet
and toss up glinting spindrifts of the sun.
They wave to us like spirits of the woods
and point to the falls proclaiming her name.

And we look
to see her descending nude from her cliff,
and shield our eyes from the dazzle and sheen,
utter tumult and panic of her name—
Casaroro! wild oceanic tongue
to the mountain’s cliffs of cool greeting dusk.
Our boys must know what haunts her troubled speech,
from innocence and wonder they suppose
half the world’s seas thundering down from God’s
open hands, but I—dimly, through the lush
stillness of forests sprouting wild from earth,
I sense how the earth will last long after
our boys have become men and forgotten
how once a mountain strode tall through their
speech.
And again I look—
a stark foreboding of our flesh’s tumble
shivers my faith, and plucks in strange despair
a fierce conjecture from God’s thundering plunge.
Was it death’s steep annihilating drop
invented our God? or tendril of hope
that in our own cliff’s fall to His wet sod
should sprout a deep abounding wilderness,
Casaroro around His streaming hands.

Gémino H. Abad is a poet, fictionist, and literary critic. He served several posts at the Unirversity of the Philippines, as Secretary of the University and the Board of Regents from 1977-1982, Vice President for Academic affairs in 1987-1990, and Director of Likhaan: the UP Creative Writing Center from 1995-1998. At present he is a University Professor Emeritus at the University of the Philippines. He received Italy’s Premio Feronia (in 2009 for his poetry, the first Filipino to have been so honored. He also represented the Philippines in the Third Mediterranea International Festival of Literature and the Arts in Rome in July 2006. He is known for his three-volume anthology of Filipino poetry in English from 1905 to the present, including Man of Earth (1989), A Native Clearing (1993), and A Habit of Shores (1999), and his six-volume anthology of Filipino short stories in English from 1956 to 2008. He also co-founded the Philippine Literary Arts Council (PLAC), and is a Regular Panelist at the Silliman University National Writers Workshop. In 2012, he was proclaimed National Artist for Literature.