William Heyen

Lord Dragonfly: Five Sequences

Vanguard Press

1981

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Recovered by Matthew Henriksen

Smoky with knowledge, Lord Dragonfly: Five Sequences teaches the intimacy of accessibility. All master poets offer profound music, but Heyen has trimmed his lines so thoroughly they ring a primary simplicity. Like a fusion of Whitman’s natural observation and the clarity of Oriental introspection, the poems so emphatically adhere to their images, both visual and visionary, that they approach objective emotionality. A force that is not Heyen’s courses through these poems as he steps back, honest to experience and devoted to allowing the experience to coincide unaltered with its artifice.

The five sequences form around an ambiguous, pervasive center, “each a consciousness defining its crises, straining to know, coming to something it can hold to,” Heyen announces in a brief prefatory note. Each sequence as it is read seems to become a center for the others, then rejoins the outer circle when the white space reappears. The five conceits, each true to a thematic constraint and their formal elements, seek to disclose an unnamable presence that is at once the apparent source of vitality and sorrow.

The first sequence, “The Ash,” charts the mourner’s cathartic restraint toward a dying friend by immersing grief into the idea of his mountain ash, an incredibly subtle, mostly narrative rendering of the deep image, though in Heyen’s poems the image is overcome by the word that conceives it. The title poem, which conjures literally the ash tree while suggesting invasively many figurative degenerative ashes, describes visits to a dying friend, descending into madness, with oblique tenderness and a spiritual lashing at self,

I nodded,

but tried to save myself, ignored him,

closed my eyes, thought (for this was May)

of my mountain ash in white bloom[.]

Confronted with his friend’s death and dispersion of intellect while absorbed in his own life, he recognizes the essential guilt of the living, manifest in the “ash,” “pure love mixed with pure death/mixed with pure swill/mixed with its own being,” the substance of which he sees growing from cycles of existence and decomposition and calls them, “blossoms of white filth.” For his intellect to resist descent into dejection and horror by over-empathizing with his friend, Heyen concedes a necessary, nearly sinister detachment

of my own oval of flowering ash

in evening air, those powers that sustain

my body’s sick room odors,

the twisted smiles, the sunlit skin

cancers, the hate-vapors drifting

toward my broken friend[.}

The sequence continues by meditating on the tree passing through seasons, not something to doubt Heyen’s getting away with, because these are masterful, purposeful, and of timeless quality. Heyen understands the Oriental nature poem deeply enough to adopt the techniques of voluminous imagery and immaculate detachment to the poetic traditions of the rural Northeast and of the style of his own time. The poems so thoughtfully invert their images (of the tree) into thought (“The ash bears,/and will, this light, this weight”) that we forget the dying friend until the concluding poem of the sequence. “The Friend” begins flatly, “Winter. My friend is not my friend,” and describes a last visit to the hospital, admitting all the sentimentalities of grief from which the speaker had earlier detached, and ending with a farewell spoken to God and the tree. In a manner similar in different ways to Rilke’s and Whitman’s, Heyen takes us to the place where intellectual restraint admits its ultimate failure and revives itself only through grief, best done in the face of beauty.

The second sequence, “Lord Dragonfly,” explores nature through Haiku-like, image-centered meditations. Early on, the poems continue the theme of “The Ash”:

In a corner of the field, wild

grapevine climbs a lightning

groove in the ash trunk.

Where are the dead?

The poems gradually become more personal, abstracting the confrontation with death to a conflict between perception and nature. Denser and trickier than the more obviously formal “The Ash,” “Lord Dragonfly” finds hidden music both in nature and the line: “Breaking the field I find/a ring of round white stones,/gift of the glacier.” The sequence, like “The Ash,” moves toward the abstract as the imagery is internalized (“With trees overhead,/Where is the void?”), finally introducing the visionary (“Outside at night/I close my eyes:/the lost chestnuts’ roots/luminous underground.”), and, in the last poems, expanding into the cosmos in a transcendental send up. And why not? Out of grief, we rise, and through artifice, we exalt. When the perceiver is priest, the body becomes altar to nature. How literally must we take Emerson, Whitman, and Heyen? Isn’t the religious experience as literal as the mathematical? And if so, what does the form of it matter?

Heyen’s poems lead toward such questions because of their accessibility and clarity, which doesn’t necessitate good poems but does allow, as also in the case of James Wright, a sublime contrast of detachment. In our tradition, poets who indulge in language seem often more immersed in subject (think Hopkins, as opposed to Browning; Hart Crane as oppose to John Crowe Ransom). As Heyen continues in the third section, “Of Palestine,” to describe the sensory experiences, medicinal properties, and historical and symbolic significances of Biblical flowers, we find a synthesis of immersion in subject and emotional detachment. Heyen doesn’t, as Zukofsky does in 80 Flowers, make his poems into representations of flowers, but instead lets his voice present his complete perception of the flowers. The brilliance of this method in this centrally located sequence is that while flowers strike all the senses but sound, through their traditions and, ultimately, their names, the flowers evoke sound in the intellect. A strong example occurs at the opening of “Madonna Flower”:

No scripture names it.

The Name for it came late.

Still, she would have seen it,

Mary, the mother its name remembers.

Each poem in the sequence attempts to remember the sensual existences of past people through the flowers, immune to conflict and decay, finally likening, by way of the words of Peter (“All flesh is as grass, but the word of the Lord endureth”), human permanence through a reflective conceit.

“XVII Machines,” more fanciful, ironic, and far less emotive than the other sequences, enumerates a menagerie of imaginary machines that seem to exist in a world beyond cathartic indulgences. In “The Machine That Collects Butterflies,” the day “is a lepidopterist’s delight,” a mechanical misconstruing, in the absence of the lepidopterist, of her love for life as a love for destroying life:

the machine whispers a fine spray

that rainbows in the golden light,

brings your prize down to your feet

like a leaf: dead, beautiful,

and perfect[.]

Where the other sequences move toward meditation, “XVII Machines” faces the subject through observation, as in “The Machine That Treats Other Machines,” (“This one, most human, can kill”) and proverbial, as in “One Machine’s Perversity,” (“Science is still lost/to know what told it what to do”). Heyen finds his way through the disaster by confronting death as oblivion through our power to live with its impending possibility. Even destroying ourselves by over-mechanization is, in a certain sense, a human act that cannot undo the beauty of life that is any way temporal.

The final sequence, “Evening Dawning,” returns to the Haiku-like form, though these poems are less nature-oriented and more concerned with their verbal reactions to nature, less concerned with death and more with the functions and limitations of perception: “My crow’s black squawk—/my white field lost again.” Though these poems aren’t supposed to conventionally “end” the revolving sequence, they bring the sequences to one possible epitome, where language contains meaning through a Keatsian synthesis with object. “Sparrow hearts/criss-crossing/the frozen field” is complete neither as representation or imagistic meditation, but the musical coinciding of emotion and vision captures the intention of the sequences: to dance in and out of mind through sensory and emotional faculties, not just for want of diversion, but to purposefully seek a similarity of perspective through as many faculties as it can, like the eyes of “Lord Dragonfly,” which “sees me from all sides at once.” While Heyen walks back and forth from cabin to wood, he finds the “other world” of mind-and-object. The world is sustained by metaphor as literal and the negotiable durance of time. The sequence also remembers “The Ash” through a distorted perspective:

From another time

at the field’s edge

the first ash

veiled in a dream

in falling snow.

Then Heyen envisions the dispersion of his intellect, though not of self perceived as part of the cosmic mind:

Dying, the brain

sheds cells.

In the end,

perfect numbers,

the mind

the Milky Way’s stars.

The grief of the early poems still resides in the speaker’s voice, but a cosmic grace akin to oblivion or loss of memory presides:

A boy, I killed these sparrows

whose tsweet, tsweet now

enters my cabin,

forgiving everything.

Lord Dragonfly: Five Sequences makes as strong a case as any long poem since Roethke’s “North American Sequence” that through natural observation and introspective clarity the intellect discovers itself as non-physical and non-temporal, a part of an abstract life “beyond the body” immediately available to us. Heyen’s style is so in tune with the traditions of the American nature poem, the New England Transcendentalist, and the Oriental mystic that he seems to say the ancient abstract in its most specific terms, while putting newness behind it through a personal vocabulary of deep imagery becoming pure language—a move that seems to have predicted the direction many young poets are taking today.