What can I do for you this night, master? asked the servant, kneeling before his Pharaoh.
The master paced the tile in shadow, free of headdress, as he preferred.
Arid breezes and swirling garments.
On cloudy nights they ceased their disciplined adjustment of mirrors that
sucked moonlight deep beneath the pyramids
where men and women worked tirelessly in deep chambers
and bacchanals flowed like wine through the night,
poets dawdling by candlelight, observing all.
On clear nights, servants were assigned to each mirror station.
The poets admired their discipline but not their fawning
or their status as servants.
A subterranean culture of nocturnal diggers, morticians, freaks, insomniacs.
Most worked through dawn, a manic colony of human ants
exploiting the desert
meeting it, absorbing it, becoming it.
Darkness and mystery deep as history and tradition.
Bring me a wife, said the Pharaoh.
His eyes burned in the half-light. The servant departed.
Myrrh and cinnamon on the breeze, hot as day.
Moonlight battled cotton clouds of aquamarine, gray, white.
What will become us, wondered the Pharaoh.
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