Give me the chance, and I will make Thy thoughts of me, like worms this day, Take wings and change to butterflies That in the golden light shall play; Thy cold, clear heart—the quiet pool That never heard Love's nightingale— Shall hear his music night and day, And in no seasons shall it fail.
I'll make thy happy heart my port, Where all my thoughts are anchored fast; Thy meditations, full of praise, The flags of glory on each mast. I'll make my Soul thy shepherd soon, With all thy thoughts my grateful flock; And thou shalt say, each time I go— How long, my Love, ere thou'lt come back?
The tombstone told when she died. Her two surnames stopped me still. A virgin married at rest. She married in this pouring place, That I struck one day by luck, Before I heard in my mother’s side Or saw in the looking-glass shell The rain through her cold heart speak And the sun killed in her face. More the thick stone cannot tell.
Before she lay on a stranger’s bed With a hand plunged through her hair, Or that rainy tongue beat back Through the devilish years and innocent deaths To the room of a secret child, Among men later I heard it said She cried her white-dressed limbs were bare And her red lips were kissed black, She wept in her pain and made mouths, Talked and tore though her eyes smiled.
I who saw in a hurried film Death and this mad heroine Meet once on a mortal wall, Heard her speak through the chipped beak Of the stone bird guarding her: I died before bedtime came But my womb was bellowing And I felt with my bare fall A blazing red harsh head tear up And the dear floods of his hair.
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Track 1
How this picture is made
What a fractal is
A fractal is a shape that keeps its pattern when you look closer. Coastlines, trees, shells, and weather do this. The large form and the small form are the same kind of thing. A poem can be drawn that way. The shape of the whole comes from the shape of the lines.
Primunia is the name for the source of that order: the pattern under the pattern, already there in a tree, a shell, and a verse.
How the boundary is drawn
The number under the picture is the poem constant. It is read from the build of the lines: their length, how uneven they are, the size of the stanzas, the share of vowels, and the way the lines end. A new word moves the number when it changes that build. The same poem always gives the same number.
Drawn on its own, that number sits in a quiet part of the plane, and most poems would look like the same soft disk. So the number is carried outward along its own direction until it meets the edge of the Mandelbrot set, where the shape turns sharp. The picture is the Julia set of that meeting place.
Each point on the canvas is folded again and again by one small rule. Points that stay near the rule form the dark interior. Points that rush away become the coloured bands. The hue comes from the poem constant, and the brightest bands turn toward gold. Change the length of a line, the stanza, or the vowel share, and both the number and the picture move.
What the branching signifies
Branching draws the poem as a tree. Each turn follows a line, and every smaller branch repeats that pattern. A longer line reaches farther. The letters at the start of a line bend the next turn. A higher share of vowels opens the branches wider.
The trunk takes its colour from the poem constant and warms toward gold at the tips. When the poem has more than one stanza, gold forks leave the trunk. Each fork is a stanza beyond the first, up to three. The tree divides where the poem divides. One stanza remains a single trunk.