This hypertext poem makes clever use of HTML in its design to tell the story of a speaker’s associations with a place in in the Louisiana bayou, relationships, and the moon. This piece is designed for a 500 x 500 pixel window and uses the now discontinued frame tag to separate the space into navigation (bottom) and textual (top) frames. A quick look at the source code in the top frame reveals that it was composed with Microsoft FrontPage 3.0 and it uses a no-longer functional JavaScript applet (from early 1996) that randomly selects one of the following three lines and scrolls them on the screen:
function scrollit_r2l(seed) { var m1 = " Conjuring: beauty, health, self-improvement. "; var m2 = " Love and Romance. "; var m3 = " Magick between dawn and sunset. ";
One more technical detail: I suggest viewing this poem with more than one browser— and at least one of them should be Internet Explorer which offers the best backwards compatibility for old code— because the screen text is rendered a bit differently by each browser. And since this is a poem you want to see as intended, I suggest using this link to the Confluence section in Cauldron & Net, volume 2 and selecting the poem so it opens in a new window (you may need to instruct your pop-up blocker to allow it). Alternatively, resize the window, so there is text aligned over the moon.
Perhaps the most important use of HTML in the design for this poem is the use of background and text colors in conjunction with changing the background color when the reader places the pointer over certain locations in the text. The text is in two colors: black and light yellow, so by toggling the background colors, one can reveal different texts on the same page. The choice of colors resonate with the lunar theme of the piece, in which the dynamics of a relationship between men and women is likened to the relative positions of the Earth, Moon, and Sun. Seen this way, the waxing, waning, and eclipses of the moon can be understood as different stages in a couple’s relationship— sometimes representing problems that not even a love potion can resolve.
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