Dave Bonta's poem opens with a riddle it never quite announces. Only the title reveals what the "two vacant globes / preserved in alcohol" are: the small glass vials of a spirit level, where a bubble floats in liquid until a surface proves true. Without the title, the image turns anatomical, with eyeballs in a jar like specimens on a laboratory shelf. That double vision drives the poem toward an uncomfortable suggestion: the way a tradesman checks a wall and the way he looks at a woman may be disturbingly alike.
The poem is a single sentence stretched over five couplets, and it keeps its main action waiting. "Who would have thought that…" sounds like the start of a question, but the poem ends on a full stop, so the surprise reads as a dry, amused exclamation. There is no rhyme and no regular beat, but the even two-line stanzas give the poem a tidy, level look on the page, while the syntax tips steadily forward. The line breaks add small touches of mischief. "could so hold a construction / worker's attention" splits a compound noun and leaves "construction" briefly alone, as though the poem were a thing being built and checked as it goes. The break after "otherwise reserved" holds us for a beat, long enough to wonder what could deserve such devotion before the answer arrives, crude and deflating.
The vocabulary is where the irony sharpens. "Devotional" belongs to church, and the title borrows the ode, a form traditionally given to elevated praise. Here the worship is directed at a tool and, a moment later, at "gravity-defying breasts or buttocks." The phrase is cleverly chosen, because a spirit level exists to obey gravity. The bubble settles where gravity tells it to. So the worker gives the same reverent stare to an instrument that measures gravity's rule and to bodies he credits with breaking it. The sound shifts with the subject. The hard, popping consonants of "breasts or buttocks" land with a leer, while "globes" and "alcohol" are rounder and more liquid. The word "spirit" in the title also floats between the spiritual and the alcoholic, and the poem enjoys both.
The most telling moment is the quiet qualification "if not always the eyes that go with them." Judging by the imagery, this creates a mirrored structure. The poem began with eyes detached from any body, vacant and pickled. It now describes bodies detached from their eyes, looked at but not looked back at. The level's vials are an ideal object for this kind of gaze because they cannot return it. They are "vacant," and they offer no resistance, no judgment and no face.
Then comes "that cool disregard," and the grammar leaves it open. It could describe the level's impassive reading, or the eyes of the woman who ignores the stare. Both readings work, and the poem seems content to let them overlap. The final couplet tightens the ambiguity: this disregard "elicits a squint & a whistle / at whatever fails to fall into line." A squint is what you do when sighting along a board, and a whistle can be the low, appraising sound over a crooked job or the wolf-whistle. The phrase "fall into line" slides from alignment to obedience, from carpentry to conformity. On one reading, the thing that offends the worker is whatever will not be straight, or will not be compliant. The ampersand adds a casual, scribbled-on-a-stud feel that makes the menace sound routine.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does without raising its voice. It never names harassment or lectures, and it lets "squint" and "whistle" do the accusing. The humor comes first, in the pickled eyes and the pompous word "devotional." The chill arrives later, when we realize the level's neutral measuring has been borrowed as cover for a very unneutral way of looking. The poem leaves us with a pointed question: when someone checks the world against a straight line, whose line is it, and who is being measured?