O ailing Love, compose your struggling wing! Confess you mortal; be content to die. How better dead, than be this awkward thing Dragging in dust its feathers of the sky, Hitching and rearing, plunging beak to loam, Upturned, disheveled, utt’ring a weak sound Less proud than of the gull that rakes the foam, Less kind than of the hawk that scours the ground. While yet your awful beauty, even at bay, Beats off the impious eye, the outstretched hand, And what your hue or fashion none can say, Vanish, be fled, leave me a wingless land . . . Save where one moment down the quiet tide Fades a white swan, with a black swan beside.
The woman with jewels sits in the café, Spraying light like a fountain. Diamonds glitter on her bulbous fingers And on her arms, great as thighs, Diamonds gush from her ear-lobes over the goitrous throat. She is obesely beautiful. Her eyes are full of bleared lights, Like little pools of tar, spilled by a sailor in mad haste for shore… And her mouth is scarlet and full—only a little crumpled—like a flower that has been pressed apart…
Why does she come alone to this obscure basement — She who should have a litter and hand-maidens to support her on either side?
She ascends the stairway, and the waiters turn to look at her, spilling the soup. The black satin dress is a little lifted, showing the dropsical legs in their silken fleshings… The mountainous breasts tremble… There is an agitation in her gems, That quiver incessantly, emitting trillions of fiery rays…
She erupts explosive breaths… Every step is an adventure From this… The serpent's tooth Saved Cleopatra.
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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.