Ten short lines, one sentence, and a single full stop that arrives only at the word "home". Dave Bonta's "Primates" moves the way its subject does: it turns toward something frightening, stares at it, and finds its way back. The title is a plain scientific label for the order that includes monkeys, apes and humans, and it puts us among the animals before the first line begins. (The word can also mean a church's senior bishops. That second sense may be a quiet joke about our self-importance, though the poem never says so.) The "we" who "turn to the forest" is the whole species, drawn back to the place it may once have lived and still half fears.
The most interesting move comes early, in the brackets: "(and other things / worth knowing / by not knowing)". The parenthesis makes the poem's central claim sound like an aside. Stopping at "worth knowing", the line makes a confident promise, and then "by not knowing" undoes it. The forest and "other things" can't be mastered or explained. We know them by standing in front of them without a map or a label. The repetition of "knowing" does the work. The same word means two opposite things within four syllables, which is exactly the paradox it describes.
Next comes "to look our full / at all we fear". "Look our full" bends the familiar phrase "look your fill," and "full" suggests both appetite and unflinching completeness. The looking is deliberate, not a glance followed by retreat. The phrase "all we fear" is wide and vague, and that vagueness suits it. The poem doesn't name wolves, darkness or death, because the forest holds whatever each reader dreads. The f sounds in "forest," "full" and "fear" tie the three together, so the place, the act of looking and the emotion become one cluster.
Then the poem swerves to the human world: "our estate like a bauble / bought with trouble". This is the only rhyme, and it is a loose one, since "bauble" and "trouble" share an ending but not a vowel. The pairing sounds like a proverb, neat and slightly sing-song, and that fits what it describes. "Estate" can mean property, but it also carries the older sense of a condition or station in life. Our wealth, and perhaps our whole settled way of living, is a trinket that cost too much. The hard b sounds of "bauble," "bought" and "trouble" are blunt and almost spat out. Set beside the forest's open, unnamed fear, the estate looks small, shiny and expensive.
The last couplet gives the poem its most surprising image: "mind a pair of compasses / to walk home". Compasses here are probably the drawing kind, two hinged legs, one fixed point and one swinging arm. That makes the mind a walking thing, a pair of legs like our own, which fits the primates of the title. Home is the fixed point, and everything else is the circle we are free to draw around it. "Mind" also works as a verb, as in "mind the step," so the line quietly advises us to attend to this tool as well as describing it. The poem suggests that what gets us home from the forest is not the estate we bought but a way of paying attention.
The form supports this. Five unrhymed-except-one couplets, with lines of only three to six syllables, give the poem a stepping, careful pace. Nearly every couplet breaks mid-thought ("worth / knowing," "our full / at all we fear"), so the reader has to keep going to find out what is meant. The lines are short enough to feel like footsteps, but there is no regular meter, so the poem never sounds like a march. It sounds like someone feeling their way along a path.
The poem is significant for how much it declines to say. It doesn't lecture about nature or condemn property. In a handful of plain words it sets fear against comfort and unknowing against knowledge, and it ends on an image of orientation rather than conquest. The forest is never defeated or even explained. We simply look at it for a long time and then walk home.