For James Wright.
I don’t know how it was
That I found myself on a ship
To Hong Kong.
Standing at the rail next to me was a Chinese.
On one eye he wore an eyepatch,
And with the other eye
Stared straight out
At the steel gray water,
Slowly falling.
I wonder if you dream a man
Must he exist
Somewhere in the world?
Perhaps
I had dreamt this man.
He turned toward me,
Solemn.
What is your journey? he asked.
I only stared.
What happened
To your eye?
Slowly he lifted the patch.
Below it there was nothing,
No hole,
Nothing. Only
A blank space
Where an eye
Would have been.
I understood.
Around us
It had begun to snow.
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Is this a poem "for" James Wright, or "after" James Wright? That's my first small question.
I feel I say this somewhat ad nauseum, but I am given pause time and time again by how you can manipulate the speed of a poem. Your writing generates a slowness; a slowness less like molasses and more like the call of a bullfrog. I mean that. Your lines have the effect of sounding like intermittent bursts and interruptions of silence, which makes the poems both effectively slow and, I feel, rather stark.
I immediately wonder how the poem might work in present tense: "I don't know how it is / That I find myself on a ship / To Hong Kong." To my ear, this lends the poem a self-loathing kind of why-do-I-do-this-to-myself quality that heightens the strangeness of the one-eyed man, but that may just be my ear.
I appreciate that he is "a Chinese" and not "a Chinese man." This has a Moby Dick tinge to it and builds on the speaker's strangeness, though I suppose you don't call him "a Chinaman."
The second stanza can be brought up in intensity, particularly the "steel gray water / slowly falling." You end "Nights" on "slowly breathing," so you may need to take this stanza in another direction syntactically.
I think you can lose "I wonder" in the third stanza, as the question is already one of wonder. Otherwise, I am quite fond of this stanza. Not sure that "Perhaps" can carry a line all by its lonesome, but the question asked here is essential and comes right on time. I feel somewhat the same way about "Solemn" in the next stanza, though here I think the word carries much more weight than "Perhaps."
The moments of dialogue have a lot of potential. I, for one, did not expect speech in this poem, which is great, but I also feel the language is a turn or two ornate. Also, do you need speech tags? You could go italics? Maybe neither? "What is your journey" strikes me as contrived speech, though I am willing to accept it from a one-eyed man on a dream boat. That said, "What happened / to your eye?" is, I think, a much more powerful question and still stays true to dialogue.
Your adverb appears again in the next stanza. I think this scene may need some tweaking, as it tends toward the expository. What happens is wonderful, but how it is shown to us grates a bit. I had wondered if this might not be a great place for a longer line.
I would urge strongly that you reconsider "I understood," especially as its own stanza. Moments like this sometimes have the effect of paraphrasing themselves: this is the part of the poem in which there is understanding to be found. I think the transition from "Would have been" to "Around us" would work well, though again I think present tense will make that last line bristle.
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