The speaker is missing someone deeply, and the poem turns that absence into a kind of shared ache. If summer doesn’t reach one of them, both lose it. Summer itself becomes a living body breathing in two long breaths: one brings mornings when corn breaks through dark soil in a low, earthy voice, and another brings silver, weightless nights full of moon songs. Those light nights are where the speaker plans to search for the lost person — not literally, but in the glint of wind-stirred hickory leaves, in the sound like slow sea water, in the silver movement under the hillside tree. The mood is tender and dreamlike, full of longing but also wonder. Grief or absence doesn’t feel heavy here; it feels suspended in moonlight and wind, as if the natural world might still hold the person the speaker misses.
Silver Wind — Summary
Do you know how the dream looms? how if summer misses one of us the two of us miss summer — Summer when the lungs of the earth take a long breath for the change to low contralto singing mornings when the green corn leaves first break through the black loam — And another long breath for the silver soprano melody of the moon songs in the light nights when the earth is lighter than a feather, the iron mountains lighter than a goose down — So I shall look for you in the light nights then, in the laughter of slats of silver under a hill hickory. In the listening tops of the hickories, in the wind motions of the hickory shingle leaves, in the imitations of slow sea water on the shingle silver in the wind — I shall look for you.