Dave Bonta's "Confabs" is only eight lines long, but it plays like a rumor passed along a row of chairs. Nothing here is a person talking. A wind, a coach, a stay and a sum of money do the chatting, and the poem asks us to listen in. Its central idea seems to be that language is full of small transactions. Words carry old trades and habits inside them, and when they are set side by side they start to deal with one another.
The title is the first clue. "Confab" is the casual shortening of "confabulation," a chat. The longer word also has a second sense, the making-up of things that never happened. The poem plays on both. It reports conversations that could not literally take place, and it does so in a flat, reasonable tone, as if gossip between a ship and a rope were ordinary news.
Each stanza pairs words that share some hidden history. In the first, a "morning wind / did business in the alder." Wind rustling through a tree becomes commerce, as though the leaves were doing trade. The second stanza is denser: "Coach dined with post— / where the letters come." A coach can be a horse-drawn carriage, and a post can be a mail station or a stopping place on a route, so the line pictures two travelers sharing a meal at an inn. Even so, "post" and "letters" slip us toward correspondence. The dash after "post" works like a nudge, and the second line arrives as a sort of aside. The third stanza is the cleverest. A "stay" is a rope that steadies a ship's mast, so a stay "had a little talk / with a ship" is almost literally a part speaking to its whole. Yet "stay" also means a pause, a delay, and the phrase "a little talk" carries a faint comic politeness. I'm drawing on the usual senses of these words here, since the poem gives no explanation, but the pairings work too neatly to be accidental.
The final stanza changes the poem's direction. "So money will give me / an answer shortly." Until now the poem has had no "me." Suddenly a speaker appears, waiting, and the language sounds like a business letter: "an answer shortly" is the kind of phrase you meet in correspondence from a bank or an office. The earlier "letters" and "business" quietly prepared this. The "So" is a small joke too. It pretends the earlier stanzas were an argument leading to a conclusion, when they were really a string of puns. "Shortly" works on two levels as well, meaning "soon" but also "curtly," which suits money, which tends to answer bluntly. The old saying that money talks hovers behind the line without being stated.
The form supports all this. The poem is four unrhymed couplets in free verse, with short, plain lines. The sound is soft but deliberate. The hard d's of "did," "business" and "dined" tap through the first stanzas like knuckles on a table. The loose l's of "letters," "little" and "alder" slow the ear. Enjambment does some of the comic work: "with a ship" sits alone on its line, as if the stay had turned to face it. Nothing is ornamented. The images are small and concrete (wind, tree, carriage, rope, ship), and their movement is from nature to travel to sea to money.
What makes "Confabs" worth reading is how much it asks of so little. It has no argument, no feeling stated outright, no moral. But it shows that ordinary vocabulary is crowded with working life, with roads, rigging, mail and trade, and that a poem can wake those associations just by lining words up and letting them speak. The speaker is left outside the conversation, waiting for the answer, as readers are. That outsider's position gives the poem a faint loneliness beneath the wit. We spend the whole poem overhearing what the world's words say to each other, and we are finally told only that a reply is on its way.