Anatomists call the airways of the lung a tree, and Dave Bonta's "Blood tree" asks what happens if we take that comparison seriously. The poem speaks to a "you", the branching passages inside the chest imagined as a living tree, and puts to it a run of questions it never answers. Will it rot? Who will nest in it? Does it want fire?
The opening is a birth: the tree is "sprung fully formed / like a god from the lung". Gods who arrive fully grown recall the myth of Athena leaping from Zeus's head, and the suggestion is that this tree was not planted or slowly grown but simply appeared, complete, out of the body. The sound helps. "Sprung" and "lung" chime, so the line has a small spring in it. Then the mood turns. "Will you rot back / into a travesty of spring" sets decay beside renewal, and "travesty" is the sharpest word in the stanza. It means a grotesque imitation, so the rot is imagined as a mock-blossoming, a false spring. The poem never says what this decay would be, but because the tree sits in a body, it is hard not to hear illness in it. That is my reading, though, not something the poem states.
The second stanza turns to the creatures who might live in such a tree. The phrase "untuning forks of your limbs" holds two pictures at once. A fork is where a branch divides, and it is also a tuning fork, an object made to give one true note. "Untuning" suggests that note slipping out of true. Birds "roost" there and the speaker wonders "what would they sing", which fits an organ that supplies the breath behind every voice. Judging by the imagery, one can hear the rasp of laboured breathing in the sound of those untuned branches, but the poem leaves the song unheard. The question stays open.
The third stanza begins with a quiet admission: "like a real tree". That small phrase concedes that this tree is a figure of speech, a borrowed one. A real tree gives off oxygen, while this lung-tree takes it in, so to "yearn / to be free of oxygen" is to long to be free of the thing that keeps it alive. The next line, "bronchial to a fault", is wry. The idiom means excessive, and it also plays on "fault" as a flaw or crack. The tone loosens for a moment into something almost comic, as if the speaker is teasing the tree for being too thoroughly what it is. The wryness does not last. Oxygen is also what fire needs, so the wish to escape it sits strangely beside the last line, "would you burn", which stands alone after the stanza break.
That last line is also where the poem's one clear rhyme lands. "Yearn" and "burn" were separated by two lines, and when "burn" finally arrives it closes the circle with a click: desire answered by consumption. Elsewhere the sound-patterning is gentler. "Spring" and "sing" are close cousins, ending the first two stanzas on a faint echo.
The form works in the same quiet way. There are no capital letters and no question marks, so the three questions slide into one another without the lift of a rising voice. Lines are short and heavily enjambed ("will you rot back / into a travesty of spring"), so reading aloud means pushing through the line breaks, almost without pausing, until the breath runs short. The stanzas shrink from four lines to three, then to three plus a single orphaned line, and the poem seems to run out of air just as it reaches the idea of fire.
The poem is worth reading because it takes a stock medical metaphor and makes it feel strange again. We usually use "the bronchial tree" as a neat diagram. Bonta lets the diagram grow bark and attract birds, then asks whether it will wither or burn. The body becomes a landscape with seasons, and the poem speaks to it gently, as if to something half-alive and separate from us. In eleven short lines it holds birth, decay, music and combustion, and it leaves the reader with the odd feeling of having just breathed in.