It’s not impossible, says the woman to the man in Kate’s poem—a beautiful ceremony followed by a lifetime of strife. How bad it gets isn’t clear. Just, he’s not inclined to ply her with sweet nothings, empty praises, libidinous gestures. Instead, she tells the man, you park out in our backyard, wind rifling through your branches, while I, ever the romantic, sleep safely underneath.1

Which leaves me mulling.

For it’s in a woods my husband and I abide, thorned and prickly, somehow persisting.

“You’re too chop happy,” I sometimes accuse, because he’s forever culling, obsessed by the canopy. (Not enough of it? Too preponderant the shade? Which? Would I know?) He’s jealous for the fledglings wanting sun, I get that much. When a giant in some thunderstorm, trunk ripped, goes roaring to the ground, he’s elated. The sound, the massive crack, the tragic swish of branchery descending in slow time—for him it’s theater.

He balked, though, at bringing down our yard maple, end of July. The high-up clumping leaves had knocked at the upstairs bedroom windows, turning the room to gloom, and we’d bickered. “I’ll just lop parts,” he said, “and then we’ll see.” For this pathetic once, he didn’t want to wholesale chop. But his sawing left the rest of the tree a poor shadow of itself, too hacked. It would keep on hogging water from the lawn, too, the way maples do. He roped the girth, and stood me on the rope’s other end, to pull hard hard,2 and didn’t that stubborn truncated thing go and fall the wrong way anyhow.

Also he’s never itched to take down the peach tree, down where forest rims our drain field. Not an invader, just wimpy and useless, it must’ve started here before us. He didn’t plant it. For a while he propped a splitting-off limb with an ugly plank. Paying little attention, the tree dropped its fuzz balls in the grass, wormy things, shell shocked, carbuncled, for the wasps to suck. And then, this August, in this hot summer of our discontent, he announced we had real peaches. Lots.

“Yeah, real peaches,” I said, “all horrible and knotty.” I didn’t believe a word until he started bringing them in and feeding me pieces.

We honestly stood at the sink in a pair and put up some, sugared, for the coming dark season.

His arms, I think—they’re the thing. Oh, not just arms. Just, those ripped, entangling branches always get me. It’s why I sleep in the wind, even dream.

 




1From “The Romantic Marries a Tree” by Kate Baer in How About Now, HarperCollinsPublishers 2025. Used with permission.

2 Proof.

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