Come to me only with playthings now A picture of a singing woman with blue eyes Standing at a fence of hollyhocks, poppies and sunflowers Or an old man I remember sitting with children telling stories Of days that never happened anywhere in the world
No more iron cold and real to handle, Shaped for a drive straight ahead Bring me only beautiful useless things Only old home things touched at sunset in the quiet And at the window one day in summer Yellow of the new crock of butter Stood against the red of new climbing roses And the world was all playthings
The farthest Thunder that I heard Was nearer than the Sky And rumbles still, though torrid Noons Have lain their missiles by — The Lightning that preceded it Struck no one but myself — But I would not exchange the Bolt For all the rest of Life — Indebtedness to Oxygen The Happy may repay, But not the obligation To Electricity — It founds the Homes and decks the Days And every clamor bright Is but the gleam concomitant Of that waylaying Light — The Thought is quiet as a Flake — A Crash without a Sound, How Life’s reverberation Its Explanation found —
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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.