A glass eye cannot see. That plain fact drives this six-line poem. Dave Bonta titles it "Second sight," the old phrase for prophetic vision, and then gives the gift to an eye made of glass. The paradox is deliberate and a little funny: the part of the face that no longer looks is the part that "gives me hope" about looking. The poem never says whether the eye is a literal prosthesis or a figure for something else, and it works either way.
The hope itself takes some untangling, and the untangling is half the pleasure. The whole poem is one sentence: the speaker hopes "that I may find no dull / old-fashioned thing // that nobody / could unsee." Read slowly, he hopes not to meet anything that is both stale and impossible to shake off. "Can't unsee" is a modern idiom, usually reserved for something shocking, an image that lodges in the mind against our will. Bonta attaches it to the opposite of shock: something dull, fusty, old-fashioned. The dread becomes boredom that cannot be escaped, a worn-out way of looking that everyone is stuck with. A glass eye, which takes in nothing in the usual manner, becomes a charm against that.
The grammar enacts the difficulty. "No" and "nobody" stack negatives, so the reader has to run the sentence twice to be sure what it hopes for. That rereading is a small second sight of its own. Whether the poem wants freshness or merely wants nothing to be inescapable stays slightly open, and the openness seems to be the point, since the poem asks for the very double look it recommends.
Sound does quiet work throughout. There is no rhyme, but the poem has its own echoes. "My glass eye" is followed two lines later by "that I may find," and the homophone invites us to hear eye and I as the same thing. The prosthetic stands in for the whole perceiving self. The hard g of "glass" returns in "gives," a soft link between the object and the hope it produces. Later, "dull / old-fashioned" is built from flat, thudding d and l sounds, so the words sound as listless as what they name. The long ee of "me" in the second line finally resurfaces in the last word, "unsee," which takes the place of a rhyme without announcing itself.
The form is three unrhymed couplets with no punctuation and no capitals at the line openings, apart from the pronoun "I." The lines are short, with two or three stresses each, and the breaks do real work. "gives me hope" stands alone as a plain, almost childlike statement before the qualifications arrive. The second couplet ends on "dull," so the word hangs at the line's edge a moment before "old-fashioned thing" completes it. In the last couplet "nobody" is stranded at the end of a line, where the eye may catch "no body" inside it. A reader with the Odyssey in mind might also hear Odysseus calling himself "Nobody" to the one-eyed Cyclops, though that is only an echo I am inferring, and the poem does not point to it. The final word, "unsee," turns on the verb of sight itself. The poem ends by naming the undoing of vision, yet it spells that undoing with "see."
The poem is significant for how much it does in so few words. It treats the loss, or replacement, of an eye as a resource, and it suggests that what dulls the world is not a shortage of things to look at but the habit of seeing them the same way. It does this without lecturing. The speaker only says he hopes, and hope is a modest, uncertain verb. "May" keeps the claim tentative too: he may find nothing dull and inescapable, and he may not.
There is also pleasure in the way the poem plays with vocabulary we usually reserve for horror. "Unsee" is an awkward, almost invented-sounding word, and the speaker's wish to find nothing that cannot be unseen reverses the usual complaint. Most of us wish we could erase what we have seen. He wishes only that nothing boring would be that sticky. Behind that small joke lies a real, slightly daring idea: that an eye which cannot see might still teach us how to.