Six short lines, no punctuation, not a single capital letter, and Dave Bonta's "Body language" still travels from a pair of hands to the moon to something glimpsed at the edge of a wood. The title is an everyday phrase for what we say without words, and the poem takes it more literally than usual. In its world the body is not just a way of sending messages. It is a language that everything shares: people, moonlight, trees, animals. Its central idea is that intimate touch is a way into that larger, wilder conversation.
It starts small, with "hands aged and handsome." The phrase works because "handsome" has "hand" inside it, so the adjective seems to grow out of the noun. These hands are old, and the poem treats their age as a quality rather than a loss. The next line gives them a gift usually kept for minds: they "understand with a touch." The verb is a quiet joke, since "understand" contains "hand" too, and the sound of the first couplet loops back on itself in a way that suits the idea. Understanding here is not worked out or explained. It happens on the skin. The poem never says whose hands these are, or whose body they touch, and that openness lets a reader supply their own picture, perhaps a long-shared tenderness, judging by the word "aged."
The second couplet is the hinge. "Everything speaks" is the poem's boldest claim, and it is stated flatly, with no argument. After it, "we" appears for the first time, and the pronoun does a lot of work: the hands have become two people, or perhaps a person and the world. "We begin to swell like the moon" is the poem's only simile, and it is a rich one. Swelling suggests desire, fullness, even pregnancy, and the moon adds a slow, cyclical, almost tidal pull. "Begin" matters as well. Nothing is finished, and the line is still rising, just as a waxing moon does. It is also the longest line in the poem, so the verse itself swells at the moment it describes swelling.
The last couplet loosens the grammar altogether. "This evening over the wood / a wild creature" has no verb. Because the line break comes after "wood," the phrase "this evening over the wood" can attach backward ("we begin to swell like the moon this evening over the wood") or forward to the creature. The poem does not choose. The "wild creature" could be an actual animal at the treeline, the moon itself, or what the "we" become once touch has done its work. Each reading is plausible, and the ambiguity seems deliberate. The poem ends on a noun, an image without a comment, which leaves the reader looking where the speaker is looking.
Formally, the poem is three unrhymed couplets, and its music comes from echo rather than end-rhyme. Beyond the "hand" sounds in the first couplet, there is the soft hiss of "speaks" and "swell," and the "w" of "swell," "wood" and "wild," which seems to carry the reader from the body into the dark trees. The lines run roughly short, long, short, so the poem swells in the middle and then thins to a whisper at "a wild creature." The lack of punctuation helps the sense of continuity. Nothing is closed off with a full stop, so touch, moon and animal seem to flow into one another.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it trusts its images. It never explains how a hand can understand, why a couple might resemble the moon, or what the creature means. It sets them side by side and lets the connections form in the reader. In doing so it quietly erases the border between human and natural worlds. Bodies are not set against the evening landscape. They are part of the same speech, and the poem's final, unanswered image suggests that to listen fully, we might need to become a little wild ourselves.