Thirty minutes after the sun dropped behind the mountains last night, I set out westward on the trail around McIntosh Lake, huddled in my coat and gloves, walking into nightfall. As the sky darkened, I noticed my shadow stretching out subtly before me. Turning around to see where the light was coming from, this far from the street, I saw the moon rising in the east, nearly full, bright as a headlamp. It stopped me with its familiar yet mysterious beauty.

In “The Poet Dreams of the Mountain” (Swan, 2010), Mary Oliver grows weary of the hectic pace of daily life and longs to spend a lifetime slowly climbing some old gray mountain, resting along the way, and seeing all that we so rarely see—the stars, the unclothed rocks, the silent poetry of the trees. “I want to take slow steps,” she says.