Dave Bonta's "Bit parts" runs to fewer than thirty words, yet it moves through three very different kinds of knowing. Each of its three couplets is built around a piece of a body: feet, hands, and finally a head. The title's pun makes the same point twice. These are body parts, and they are also "bit parts", minor roles in a play. Each gets a brief moment on stage, and the last one steals the show.
The first couplet makes a surprising claim: "feet know how / to love the land." We usually say that minds know things and hearts love them. Here the feet do both. "Know how" carries the sense of practical skill, the knowledge you can't explain but can perform, like riding a bike or finding a path in the dark. Love, in this picture, is not a feeling but a way of walking, a steady contact between sole and soil. The plain, short words ("feet," "know," "love," "land") sound as grounded as the idea. The soft *l* sounds in "love the land" even make the line feel like a gentle step.
The second couplet is harder to pin down, and that seems deliberate. With no punctuation, "hands having a way to be rich / turn to design" can be read more than one way. Hands that are skilled and full of ability might turn their richness toward making things. Or hands that have found a way to be wealthy might turn away from labour and toward planning. The verb "turn" is slippery too, since it can mean "become" or "face toward." Either way, something shifts between the first couplet and the second. The feet touch the land directly, while the hands move toward "design," a word that suggests drawings, patterns and intention, a step back from the soil. The longest line in the poem ("hands having a way to be rich") is smooth and flowing, and then it snaps shut on the brisk "turn to design." The rhythm seems to act out that turning.
Then comes the surprise. "I discover a cod's head / in my manuscript." This is the first time the speaker appears ("I"), and it is the only line that sounds like a real event. A severed fish head is blunt, smelly and physical. It has no business in a pile of papers. The sounds change as well: "cod's head" is two hard, heavy syllables, like something dropped on a table. "Manuscript" is the longest word in the poem and the last, and it has a quiet joke built in. It comes from Latin roots meaning "written by hand," so the word quietly takes us back to the hands of the second couplet. The hands that turned to design have produced writing, and the writing turns out to contain something raw and animal.
What the cod's head means is left open, so any reading is an inference. It might be an intrusion of the real world into the realm of design, a reminder that the body and the land keep pushing back into the written page. Since the poem is arranged from feet to hands to head, the cod's head may take the place where a thinking human head should be, as if the mind has been replaced by something fishy and unexpected. It could also be a joke at the poet's expense, a suggestion that the manuscript contains something rotten or odd that the writer only now notices. The word "discover" supports this. The speaker did not put the head there on purpose, and finding it is a small shock.
The poem has no rhyme and no capital letters apart from "I." The couplets are short and sparse, and they trust the reader to make the links. That leanness is part of what makes it interesting. It suggests that knowledge comes in several forms: the knowledge of the feet, the planning of the hands, and the writing of the head. The poem also implies that writing is least trustworthy when it forgets where it came from. Its final image is a small, strange, slightly comic jolt, and it makes you look back over the whole poem and ask what else in it might not be what it seemed.