The essential link of the imagination with the document is here considered from the viewpoint of apoetical praxis : collecting documents which will be then entered into poem, a route or gesture of the imagination that cannot be reduced to any analysis in terms of reference. The poetic imagination then produces, from the presence of documented objects, gaps in the surface, images of language stemming from discourses and from any type of metalanguage : a non-documentary use of the document. The observer, the one who imagines, comes forward in the concomitances irreducible to explicit reconstructions which he/she orchestrates; he/she describes, makes image from all language, sees the document within language.