The Nilometer
Kepler used to say science was thinking God’s thoughts after he was finished with them, but what did God think about the Nilometer, meant to measure the rising floodwaters in the delta, but useless beyond the fertile plain? Everything I know about Egypt I learned in school: a skull could be pulled intact from the sand there, wrapped in tuile, its face painted on the outside, buried beneath the point of a pyramid. Not one, but many who lived among them believed the sun was the iris of just one God’s eye, unlike Kepler, who kept navigating the elliptical outline of the universe, as concretely defined as the moon-shell surface of an elephant’s pupil, or the golden nail of a fly’s cornea. Convex compass to constellation: unaware how deep it ran, or to which country he’d return when he set out to prove no God but nature, the sun’s red collapse into the river, the world washing up on its shores.