Description de l’Égypte

One morning a charred ink line

            in the botanist’s notebook:

after the invasion, a garden planted in Cairo.

            The French army recording the distance

between beast and cotton seed.

            Napoleon had wings, flew as Mercury above the pyramids

a sprig of blue inventing atmosphere.

            The text speaks it and so it becomes

image and imagine and the people beneath;

            pool of statives beating                 know known know known.

One morning my birth is an ink line

            in the language of plantations.

I grow to watch the memory assemble me:

            a fiction of poppies and idolatry,

gradient in supernumerary fervor,

            bloody at the footnote. There is a door that betweens

me and then, the authors say the door is always open,

            the ghosts say the door is not for us.