a temple of dragons

The red temple of dragons sits atop the city.  Above the known residences of the elite overlooking the city that sprawls itself like a net for all the working middle; that spreads itself thinner as it goes farther from the Uptown and closer to where the port-less edges.

T, though no longer as militant, and I couldn't help "reading" the landscape while climbing up the red stairways of the red-pillared temple:  how myths were, or have become, religion; how a culture is strong and vulnerable, how art is, how economy is.  No lengthy discussions; only many fragmented ideas.  Some photographs.  We tried de-constructing the temple:  turning it into the highest temple of the folk Sky heavens:  Agyo's; or the dragons, turning real, the last protectors of the temple under siege.  We've had had more conversations on culture and the comic book (as cultural by-product) the past forty-eight hours.  

Inside the temple, a kowtow.  And the scent of incense.

For a moment, at high noon, at the foot of the stairs before leaving, T mentioned a word I took for dusk.  

We went to another temple, a coral-stone church; and then another of the most recent architecture, a hundred white walls like dominoes on top of a land that used to be sea; all in two hours. Then it was time to send off T to the airport, to the parallel universe I once had been.

Along the way, watching from the window the road edge curves and the stiff street light posts, I realized I liked lines.  Literal, visual, two-dimensional lines: the way they are drawn against a backdrop of negative space.  "Espasyo," T said.  

The sky was so clear, it was white and cloudless.  Marching the beginning of summer.


On my way home, the dusk in the city was a gradation of the lightest  yellow, to cyan, to a sober dark blue.  No tinge of red.  A waxing moon was rising, thin and white like a clipped nail.