Where Joy Still Breathes
There was gold in the air, not from the sky, but from the memory of it—reflected, remembered, drawn through foliage and breath. I stood before her. An apsara encircled by stone leaves, lifted mid-dance. She was not still. She was listening. Listening to her own rhythm, long ago carved into trust.
I composed the image slowly. Not just with film and light, but with stillness. The shutter did not interrupt. The camera watched without demand. Later, I would shape the silence by hand—the way one tends an ember, not to claim it, but to keep it alive.
Her joy was not ephemeral. It remains.
She lifted her foot—
not to leave,
but to remain.A turning not outward,
but inward—
a dance beneath the dance,
a light beneath the stone.I bowed without bowing.
She spoke without words.
What was carved into dusk
still breathes.
Also in Library
Stone That Remembers the Sky
This poem listens to Angkor not as ruin, but as grammar—where moss, shadow, and proportion carry devotion forward without spectacle. What endures here is not glory, but measure: a way of standing that no longer needs witnesses.
Rice-Ghost and the Seven Drums
At harvest, the danger is not hunger but forgetting how to listen.
This folklore retelling speaks of drums struck for silence, of grain taken without gratitude, and of a narrow figure who does not punish—only waits. A tale of pacts made not with spirits, but with attention itself.
Naga Vow
A lost city sleeps in the jungle, its thresholds carved with serpents — not ornament, but law. This vow-poem enters love as sacred hunger: desire as guardianship, devotion as possession, the body speaking without language. A liturgy of heat, roots, rain, and the terrible tenderness of being claimed.
$250
Ta Prohm Temple, Angkor, Cambodia — 2021
Limited Edition Archival Pigment Print
Edition
Strictly limited to 25 prints + 2 Artist’s Proofs
Medium
Hand-toned black-and-white archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Bamboo — a museum-grade fine art paper chosen for its quiet tactility and reverent depth, echoing the spirit of the temples.
Signature & Numbering
Each print is individually signed and numbered by the artist on the border (recto)
Certificate of Authenticity
Accompanies every print
Image Size
8 x 8 inches (20.3 x 20.3 cm)
There are moments when light seems to arrive not from above, but from within the stone.
At Ta Prohm Temple, as the sun dropped behind the jungle canopy, a warm breath of dusk spilled across the western gopura. A single apsara emerged from the wall—smiling, suspended mid-dance, her foot lifted inside a ring of carved foliage. The sandstone glowed gold, as if joy had kindled it from the inside.
Lucas Varro stood in stillness before her. The jungle had hushed. The wall seemed to breathe. And in that hush, he released the shutter—medium format black-and-white film drinking in the fading light. Later, in the quiet of his studio, the image was shaped using long exposure, classical chiaroscuro techniques, and a golden hand-toning process that recalled the warmth of that sacred dusk.
Printed on museum-grade Hahnemühle Bamboo paper, this archival pigment print is offered in a strictly limited edition of 25 + 2 AP.
She dances still—within the stillness you welcome her into.
