Knitting needles, unlike sewing needles, have no eye, and Dave Bonta's "Eyepiece" starts from that small fact of blindness. "Two needles knitting and not an eye between them" can be heard two ways: the tools are literally eyeless, and nobody is watching them work. From there the poem moves toward the opposite condition, a body that will open an eye wherever it likes. Its central idea is that the body is unfinished, that seeing is not reserved for the face, and that to see at all is to be exposed to loss.
The first stanza is built on sound. "Click click" is pure onomatopoeia, and the needles quickly stop being sewing equipment and become a landscape: "the path turns in upon itself, / a field of knots." A path that doubles back is a maze, and a field of knots sounds both pretty and a little trapped. Then the poem swerves. The same clicking becomes "the sound an eyetooth makes / before it breaks." The eyetooth is a good find, because it is a body part that already has "eye" in its name without being able to see. The stanza ends on "makes" and "breaks," a near-echo that snaps shut like the sound it describes.
The second stanza drops into a plain, almost conversational voice: "Bodies aren't as finished as we think." There is no imagery in that line, just a claim, and the next one pushes it further. "A third eye can open anywhere" borrows the familiar idea of a mystical third eye but cuts it loose from the forehead. Then comes the joke, if it is a joke: "Certain navels allure / with a permanent wink." A navel is a scar, a place where we were once attached to someone else, and here it becomes a closed eye with a flirtatious lid. The word "allure" is slightly arch, and the phrase "navel-gazing" hovers behind the lines without being named. In four short lines the poem goes from eerie to cheeky, and it never quite settles which.
The final stanza is the longest, and it gathers speed. "There's hardly a part of the body / that can't learn vision" is a careful choice of verb. Vision is something the body learns, like a skill, not something it is born with or blessed with. Then the image widens: "clock stopped / at the center of a hurricane." This is the eye of the storm, a calm ringed by violence, but a clock face is round like an eye too, and a stopped clock suggests a stare in which time freezes. The next line, "all-seeing shape that plays for keeps," reduces the eye to a pure shape. "All-seeing" has a faintly religious, faintly surveillant ring, and "plays for keeps" has the ring of a children's game played with real stakes. Judging by the phrasing, the watching here is not comfortable.
Then the poem does something unexpected with its endings. Almost everything so far has avoided rhyme, but the last two lines, "It shines. / It weeps," are the poem's one full rhyme, tied back to "keeps." Held in reserve until the end, it lands like the final click of a needle. The two short sentences give the eye its two jobs, to catch light and to leak water. The pronoun "It" never names its subject. It could be the shape, the eyepiece or the poem itself. What matters is the pairing: to see is to shine, and also to be hurt by what you see.
The title gathers all this up. An eyepiece is the lens you press against your own eye, and "piece" also suggests a fragment of body, or a short work of writing. The poem offers itself as an instrument for looking at the body differently. Much of its force comes from wordplay that works like evidence. The word "eye" turns up where it shouldn't, in the needle, the eyetooth and the hurricane, just as the poem claims eyes turn up on the body. The form acts out the argument. And the poem's own writing is stitched, with its click, its knots and its late-arriving rhyme.
Its significance lies in how much it unsettles in so little space. It is short, funny and a bit unnerving, and it leaves the reader checking whether they, too, are as finished as they think.