This tuft that thrives on saline nothingness, Inverted octopus with heavenward arms Thrust parching from a palm-bole hard by the cove— A bird almost—of almost bird alarms,
Is pulmonary to the wind that jars Its tentacles, horrific in their lurch. The lizard's throat, held bloated for a fly, Balloons but warily from this throbbing perch.
The needles and hack-saws of cactus bleed A milk of earth when stricken off the stalk; But this,—defenseless, thornless, sheds no blood, Almost no shadow—but the air's thin talk.
Angelic Dynamo! Ventriloquist of the Blue! While beachward creeps the shark-swept Spanish Main By what conjunctions do the winds appoint Its apotheosis, at last—the hurricane!
High on a hill, Straddle and soak, Out of the way of the eyes of men, Out of the way, Straddle her wrinkled knees Until the day’s broken— Christ, let me write from the heart, War on the heart— Puff till the adder is, Breathe till the snake is home, Inch on the old thigh Till the bird has burst his shell, And the carnal stem that stood Blowing with the blood’s ebb, Is fallen down To the ground.
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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.