He saw the hula flower in her hair Drop to her bosom where it rose and fell. Forgotten was her lover; her slow stare Felt for his eyes; her warm body's smell— The yellow stamen perfume on her breath, The poison-heavy sleepiness of death Made all her figure's slender golden grace Swing like a censer in an altared place.
Swinging she danced the hula and the moon Hung on a mountain honeying the night. Her dress of flowers whirled about her—strewn Along the grass the fire-petals died. Then like a bat against that disc of light Leaped up her lover and the lonely wide Hollow and shadow echoed as he cried.
After the blast of lightning from the east, The flourish of loud clouds, the Chariot throne, After the drums of time have rolled and ceased And from the bronze west long retreat is blown,
Shall Life renew these bodies? Of a truth All death will he annul, all tears assuage? Or fill these void veins full again with youth And wash with an immortal water age?
When I do ask white Age, he saith not so,— "My head hangs weighed with snow." And when I hearken to the Earth she saith "My fiery heart sinks aching. It is death. Mine ancient scars shall not be glorified Nor my titanic tears the seas be dried."
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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.