Im Abend sind wir steile grünbebuschte Dünenwege hingeschritten. Du ruhst an mich gedrängt. Die Kreideklippe schwingt ihr schimmerndes Gefieder über tiefem Meere. Hier, wo der Fels in jäher Todesgier ins Leere Hinüberlehnt, sind einst zwei Liebende ins weiche blaue Bett geglitten.
Fern tönt die Brandung. Zwischen Küssen lausch ich der Legende, Die lachend mir dein Mund in den erglühten Sommerabend spricht. Doch tief mich beugend seh' ich wie im Glück erstarren dein Gesicht Und dumpfe Schwermut hinter deinen Wimpern warten und das nahe Ende.
Light, I know, treads the ten million stars, And blooms in the Hesperides. Light stirs Out of the heavenly sea onto the moon’s shores. Such light shall not illuminate my fears And catch a turnip ghost in every cranny. I have been frightened of the dark for years. When the sun falls and the moon stares, My heart hurls from my side and tears Drip from my open eyes as honey Drips from the humming darkness of the hive. I am a timid child when light is dead. Unless I learn the night I shall go mad. It is night’s terrors I must learn to love, Or pray for day to some attentive god Who on his cloud hears all my wishes, Hears and refuses. Light walks the sky, leaving no print, And there is always day, the shining of some sun, In those high globes I cannot count, And some shine for a second and are gone, Leaving no print. But lunar night will not glow in my blackness, Make bright its corners where a skeleton Sits back and smiles, a tiny corpse Turns to the roof a hideous grimace, Or mice play with an ivory tooth. Stars’ light and sun’s light will not shine As clearly as the light of my own brain, Will only dim life, and light death. I must learn night’s light or go mad.
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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.