Ineritance

by Becky Palapala

There are some realities we cannot choose—
rules, laws, crucial truths,
known to bodies like reflexes
that reply only to the spine.
Since we cannot name them, we cannot
talk, write, put them down, arrange them—
pick them up when they assent

to our manipulation—
we call them broken. Mistake.
But that leaves some things unexplained.
Trees that stretch like lungs above the earth
or below, why—again and again,
speckless cities flood in the spring delta.

The basic structure is a branching off
of purposes halved—and halved again.
The very blood, from the heart's headwater
to the outlying tributaries, ramifies
below the wrists' soft skin and rushes the face

flush as new leaves whose own veins run
to the edges of their space and spill over—
send out Gordian webs of breath. So then,
we have been damned by trees—

if we have ever damned ourselves.
The efficiency of the lung, the logic of spine—
that nameless shape would curse us for our roots,

but the river does not regret last spring.
I urge you to check the numbers—

there are no mistakes.