Contributor’s Marginalia: Dawn Manning responding to Amit Majmudar’s “Apollinian”

We meet three Apollos in “Apollinian,” weaving around each other in Amit Majmudar’s funhouse mirror-maze of lush imagery—imagery that also weaves, uttering the diction of both the casual, modern reader of myth and the elevated language of a more sophisticated and scientific acolyte.

To Nietzsche and his strumming, “balanced hexameter” dreamboy, I say:

The bees which he has maddened now can sting no more.*

And to the ‘sunspotted’ god throwing aurora ‘orgies’, who “each day goes chasing a high, then crashes:”

I, too, aim for suns only to crater the moon.

And to the god of perfect pitch, who must grit through the “dirges we chirp,” whose arrested development as the toxic-bro archetype never allows him to learn to deal with life’s disappointments and rejections: you should know, I am no Daphne, and there are very few naiads left. We won’t be bored until we’re tree’d by the likes of you.

Sulky
Apollo, lie
awake knowing you’re just
a sun to this minor cluster
of planets—an ember among ashes
singeing the cloth that keeps our prints
from smudging the perfect
black heart of the
cosmos.

———-
Riffs off a hexameter line from Wordsworth.