I think of how Nietzsche imagined Apollo—Olympian archer,
eternally winning the gold. Seven strings of a lyre, the eighth one
his bowstring, he strums it and maddens the bumblebees, shivers
the dreamcatcher spiderwebs caught in his sunlight. Apollo far-shooting,
Apollo unflappable, chiseled marmoreal equipoise, ageless
Aegean aloofness. Everyone lowers their gaze from his halo.
A coolheaded musical sun god; a balanced hexameter dream.
          But then I remember the stories that physicists tell of the sun.
They’ve outed his secrets, his orgies of hydrogen fusion, his flareups,
acetylene-eyed mythamphetamine parties all night in the Arctic—
Dionysus, compared to that arsonist, merely an affable lush.
Hotheaded Apollo has always been out of control, his forearms
sunspotted with track marks that hint at how much he’s been shooting
this summer. His manias match his depressions, eleven-year cycles
of clockwork psychoses that surge through the power grid, blow out
the fuses. No bard of ebullient balance, no crafter of reasonable
dactyls, each day he goes chasing a high, then crashes and burns
in the ocean.
                    It has to be maddening, doesn’t it? The weight
of his lyre and light. To be blessed with this infinite absolute music,
then burdened with fallible fleshly musicians to filter it through—
eternally hearing us botch what he births in us, dirges we chirp,
his genius coaxing the coloratura from brindled cows.
No wonder he blazes. Lustrations of language, frustrations of form.
He chases a lover and watches her shiver aloft as a laurel.
He strums to himself for a while, then burns the forest down.