My love and I met near an altar, and over the weeks I could see the relief on the faces of women who had carried me there from the rhythm of my hiking boots on the pavement, desperate at the edges of my cage, reaching for tree roots and usually missing. Catching my breath, grateful for a restbeat. They would toast to each other with terrible coffee: Thank heaven, Alleluia, she’s been tamed.
Codswallop. Tamarack. Pseudacris crucifer. He was shimmering softly near the end of a pew, hopeful of heaven, but more sure of love. A gentle bystander who would have tried to lift the Christ down, dampen a cloth, apply healing herbs, and when all else failed, cradle him, hold him in sleep unto death. Eyes whose light could see the tragic in it, would have wanted to help, would rather be outside.
In the woods of an old man who’d left them to the woods. To a halo of leaves crowning well-fed worm villages. Sweet maple sap and pale paper birch, a tangle of bracken untidied and thriving. Enveloped in sunset, a sky made of wonder, and I caught him, fearless in his cloudward gaze. I could love you, I laughed from the bottoms of my feet, who were rooting themselves in that strange new feeling of stable ground, the joy of soft dirt underneath them.
I see you, Cloudgazer. A riot of hope found us following trails straight into their mysteries of mountain, engulfed in lakes, maybe once a week whispering thanks to a face. All of it sang of God. The ladies saw only the reflections in their coffee cups. Tapping their watches, winking at my belly, as if it should be holding someone other than me.
The garlands we tossed over the altar—the trout lilies wound with forget-me-nots—led us back into the pews. To give thanks, to offer the stained glass a kiss, we were asked to pay welcome to so much more: creeds, explanations, customs not quite ancient enough for the mountains. We let them do it. They told us what love meant, and we just smiled.
But the things we got away with were worth it. Our footprints all over the sanctifying earth. A chorus of welcome anointed our delight. When the river water flowed into a font, it was covered with a cross and allowed to be holy. We learned history, the human kind. We sang harmony on love songs to God. On evenings too close to the edge of falling, we would chant, we would pray, and not alone.
The seeds tickled our fingertips: Plant us. Grow with us. So we landed on ground that promised to keep us, if we would feed it. All the refuse of the world that just needed a home. Cow-drops for the broccoli, compost everything, banana peels tucked in by the birches.
Our work now is to learn what the caterpillars eat. To watch our neighbors so closely we can learn their ways. How the mourning doves flutter over early for their water, before the sun hits. How the rabbits love the tall grass with the seeds still on, but prefer to nibble them down to the nubs in the evenings, when nobody’s watching but us and the crickets, or the first round of pseudacris crucifer. The nonthreatening lives of the listeners. Long may they sing.
Because, ladies, there was no man sent to tame me. No girl to press a suit onto that monk you once knew. He and I never intended to subdue each other under our feet. There was a recognition, one day in the woods, two bits of birch bark ignited on treelight. From there a life emerged, plotless, open. We are busy, yes. Rewilding.
T-M Baird’s poems have appeared in various journals and anthologies, most recently Love is for All of Us (2025). She mostly writes on environmental ethics and spirituality. T-M sold books, taught toddlers, and ran a small post office before returning to her native northeast, to focus on growing vegetables with her sweetheart and their dog.
