Midnight Walk

by Jon Miller

Winter. Full moon held
in a birch’s leafless branches
and we are walking the paths
about our house. We pause
at the usual way stations -
sagging fence, roofless croft, river bank -
and note what the world misses
or dream into a midnight pool
measuring what depths of years
and have found us here,
peering deeper into the dark,
separating leaf from frond,
stone from rock till everything
becomes itself and other
as we do in our reluctance
to return to those hanging panes
stuffed with thick yellow light
where we are too much seen
and would rather keep going
out across moonlit fields
half-hidden silvered things
more forgotten than ever before.