Almost a week, and not a line from you. And just a year ago, once every day, Or three times, even, you would write and say "I love you! Oh, I love you! It's all true! It's like a song, our love is. Oh, my dear There isn't any minute I don't miss you! If I could only touch you now, or kiss you! Things are just flat and stale without you here!"
Oh, yeh? Let's see this note six days ago: "Not much of any news…it's awful hot… I don't do very much…. Oh, I forgot; I went last night with Charlie to a show…. "
What was that movie line about "Love's dawn"? Where's the waste-basket? Please excuse the yawn.
You never come back I say good-by when I see you going in the doors. The hopeless open doors that call and wait And take you then for— how many cents a day? How many cents for the sleepy eyes and fingers?
I say good-by because I know they tap your wrists. In the dark, in the silence, day by day. And all the blood of you drop by drop, And you are old before you are young You never come back
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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.