Sometimes the sky’s too bright, Or has too many clouds or birds, And far away’s too sharp a sun To nourish thinking of him. Why is my hand too blunt To cut in front of me My horrid images for me, Of over-fruitful smiles, The weightless touching of the lip I wish to know I cannot lift, but can, The creature with the angel’s face Who tells me hurt, And sees my body go Down into misery? No stopping. Put the smile Where tears have come to dry. The angel’s hurt is left; His telling burns.
Sometimes a woman’s heart has salt, Or too much blood; I tear her breast, And see the blood is mine, Flowing from her but mine, And then I think Perhaps the sky’s too bright; And watch my hand, But do not follow it, And feel the pain it gives, But do not ache.
The interests of a black man in a cellar Mark tardy judgment on the world's closed door. Gnats toss in the shadow of a bottle, And a roach spans a crevice in the floor.
Aesop, driven to pondering, found Heaven with the tortoise and the hare; Fox brush and sow ear top his grave And mingling incantations on the air.
The black man, forlorn in the cellar, Wanders in some mid-kingdom, dark, that lies, Between his tambourine, stuck on the wall, And, in Africa, a carcass quick with flies.
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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.