Few poems make so large a claim in so few words, and fewer still do it by undermining the medium they are written in. Dave Bonta's "Concurrence" begins by ranking two ways of knowing and putting speech second: "the honest body is wiser / than any word." The rest of the poem works out what that honesty looks like and what it feels like to arrive at it. Its central idea is that the body tells the truth simply by existing, in agreement with the world around it, while language is where deceit becomes possible.
The title is the key to this idea. "Concurrence" means agreement, but it also carries the older sense of running together, of two things happening side by side. The second couplet fits that meaning. The body is "a presence without any reply / but the world." It does not argue or explain, and its only answer is to be there, fully part of what surrounds it. Notice that the poem never describes this body in physical detail. There are no hands, eyes or breath, only the idea of presence, which makes the body feel less like a possession and more like a way of belonging.
The poem's sound and shape support this quietly. It is built from four unrhymed couplets, with no capital letters and no punctuation, so the thoughts slide into one another without the small formal acts of sentence-making. In the first two couplets a longer line is followed by a clipped one, "than any word," "but the world," and each lands with a soft thud, like a conclusion set down on the table. Those two short lines also hide a nice detail. "Word" and "world" differ by a single letter, and the poem lets them sit close together, as if language and reality were almost the same thing but for one small, slippery gap. The plain, mostly one- and two-syllable vocabulary keeps the voice calm, almost conversational, and the long, drawn-out sounds in "wiser," "world" and "novice" slow the reading down.
The third couplet is where the wordplay deepens. "No novice to concurrence / it gives great content." Read one way, "content" means contentment, a settled satisfaction, which suggests the body's long practice at agreeing with the world brings it a kind of peace. Read with the stress on the first syllable, it means substance, what a thing contains, and the body gives "great content" in the way a text or conversation does, only without needing words. The poem lets both meanings stand, and the small joke is that it makes its point about meaning through a word that means two things.
Only in the last couplet does a person appear: "and I am glad to be so / having done all my lying." Until now the poem has spoken about "the body" in a general, almost philosophical way. The sudden arrival of "I" makes the idea personal, and the confession is disarming. "Lying" works on two levels. It means telling falsehoods, which fits the poem's suspicion of words. It can also mean lying down, the body at rest, which fits the poem's trust in the body. The phrase "having done all my lying" suggests someone looking back, tired of pretending and relieved to stop, though the poem never says what the lies were. The tone is wry and unshowy, closer to a quiet exhale than a grand renunciation.
What makes the poem worth reading is its paradox. It uses language to say that language is less wise than the body, and it knows the irony. By ending on "lying," the last word of the poem is the very thing the speaker has given up, so the poem seems to stop speaking just as it admits what speech can do wrong. That gives the argument credibility: a poem that boasted of its own truthfulness would be suspect, while one that confesses to a lifetime of lying earns some trust. In eight short lines, it asks readers to think about the gap between what we say and how we simply are, and it leaves them with the sense that the second might be the better guide.