Like a messenger, they came unannounced.

Low swirls of clouds in fast forward, dark and heavy with rickety chews.

They came from mountaintops, I volunteered.

Our teacher scanned the sky, his eyes poised in flight over a roofless room.

Reading had to dry that afternoon.

How the yellow snail outwitted the vicious brown pilandok

was neatly pegged across a tight line,

which is the textbooks' spine.

Marcos smiled on the cover.

Like ducks, the teacher herded us into the open field

just in time for the first drop;

a thud, heavy as bird dropping. A few scampered,

the classmate who got it had fingers shaped into a beak. This one's male which is brown.

Yellows are female, explained the teacher who poked it with a stick.

The insect clinged, its arms spidery and wiry.

A moment after, a purring torrent fell on a fire tree,

dousing its flames,

leaving it bare as matchstick, which must have triggered

that series of explosion;

a crackling-filled air of falling branches. We saw them pick

the green breaths out of trees clean,

leaving them bare as limbs; brown with leech-looking scabs,

bloated and dark. Classes, of course, had to be dismissed.

The tallest boy hurried to stir the school bell.

When I came to the rice paddies with mother's crown-shaped basin,

hordes of itiks were already unleashed from holding pens,

hundreds of beaks siphoning the muck,

shrill quacking piercing the air thick with critters.

Laundry, meanwhile, was tumbled aside and piled atop big river rocks

like lifeless bodies, foaming with suds.

Farmers, wives were banging pans and pot bottoms.

Dogs and cats leapt,

paws like clovers bloom in open grasses.

Neighboring kids then appeared,

shouldering sacks, the same used for picking carabao dungs. The big excitement

got Junjun Curameng a hard on, which he made me feel before sharing his sack.

He refused to split the loot when western light poured on the valley.

Nanang promised to fry me some, he boasted.

The wind took them back to the mountaintops, says our teacher before resuming the fable

two days later. Marcos's teeth glint on the cover.

Behind those mountains, I imagine an unbroken shadow of seas,

deep and unforgiving but then,

I know better:

It was in those brief moments when wings deny them flight

when they climb over each other,

brown over yellow, rungs of eggs in between that something,

someone's immortality is hatched even after the inevitable death.