A historian's phrase, "primary sources" means the original documents: letters, diaries, records, the things everything else is built on. Dave Bonta uses it as the title for nine lines that move from the internet to bird tracks to a lump of tree sap, and the whole poem is a quiet argument about where the original text really lives.
The first stanza reads as a small riddle. "One line for all / the caravans of the internet" suggests a single cable or wire carrying everything, though the poem never says so. I'm inferring that from the image of a "wavy shadow," which sounds like a sagging line's shadow stretched across the ground. The word "caravans" does a lot here. It brings in camels, trade routes and slow travellers crossing a desert, and sets them against the instant traffic of data. The comparison makes the internet look both enormous and oddly flimsy. All that cargo is carried by one thin line, and what we are given is only its shadow. Even the dash before "its wavy shadow" works like a drop of the voice, as if the poet were looking down from the grand idea to the faint mark on the ground. "Line" also means a line of verse, so the stanza may be hinting that writing, too, is a shadow of something else.
The second stanza turns to marks that are not shadows at all. Bird tracks are a kind of writing, a row of small signs pressed into a surface by the thing that made them. The poet is "looking at" them the way one reads, and the response is a joke with a real sting: "I feel a certain anxiety / of influence." The phrase echoes the critic Harold Bloom's famous idea that poets are haunted by the writers who came before them. Here the predecessor is a bird, which is funny, but it also makes sense. A bird's track is more direct than any poem, because the bird didn't write it to be read. The line break helps the joke along. "Anxiety" sits alone at the end of its line before "of influence" arrives, so the worry hangs in the air a moment, as anxiety does. The tone, with its mock-scholarly "a certain," is dry and self-aware. The poet laughs at himself while still meaning it.
The third stanza answers the anxiety by changing the sense involved. The poet stops looking and starts chewing: "I chew on a piece / of congealed black cherry sap / from a head-sized burl." The language grows thicker and more physical. "Congealed black cherry sap" is a clotted run of hard consonants that slows the line down, and you can almost feel the sticky mouthful. "Head-sized burl" is blunt, a string of heavy syllables, and the unexpected size makes the burl seem like a strange bodily growth on the tree. The poem doesn't explain what a burl is or why the sap is there. It just lets the detail stand, which is part of its point: this is a source that arrives without commentary. Where the first stanza gave us a shadow and the second gave us tracks to decipher, the third gives us the substance itself, taken straight into the body.
Formally, the poem is spare. There is no rhyme, and the lines are uneven. The first two stanzas have a long middle line between two short ones, as if each thought swells and then settles, and the third stanza feels steadier. Each stanza is one sentence or fragment, so the poem moves in three small steps, each one closer to touch. It looks like a haiku sequence in its brevity and its attention to nature, but it doesn't follow a strict syllable count, and it prefers a wry, thinking voice to a purely observed moment.
What makes it worth reading is how much it fits into so little space. It sets mediated knowledge, the internet's shadow, against unmediated experience, the tracks and the sap, without lecturing. The conclusion it leaves us with is slightly comic, since the best way to escape the burden of other writers may be to stop reading them and eat a piece of tree. That is a believable kind of relief, and the poem earns it by being honest about the anxiety first.