The lashed silk wraps you in raw gold: Your shoulders flexed, your subtle hips Swaying to rhythms that were old When first Columbus begged for ships.
Old as the mountains: flowing forth From dark to bright as your arms flow Upward like swallows darting north, Downward like their swerved wings that know
When on the instant to wheel south. Against the purring castanets Is set the secret of your mouth, A crafty scarlet that forgets.
Your gypsy heels beat fierce tattoo: An arabesque of sudden pain. Vehement, glowing, who are you? What is the meaning of this Spain?
Your skirt flares tense with intricate turning And gay tormented sequins clink. You give us only time for learning To feel, to suffer…not to think.
With the man I love who loves me not, I walked in the street-lamps' flare; We watched the world go home that night In a flood through Union Square.
I leaned to catch the words he said That were light as a snowflake falling; Ah well that he never leaned to hear The words my heart was calling.
And on we walked and on we walked Past the fiery lights of the picture shows— Where the girls with thirsty eyes go by On the errand each man knows.
And on we walked and on we walked, At the door at last we said good-bye; I knew by his smile he had not heard My heart's unuttered cry.
With the man I love who loves me not I walked in the street-lamps' flare— But oh, the girls who ask for love In the lights of Union Square.
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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.