Two friends go hiking just before a tense election, get so wrapped up in arguing about politics that they take a wrong turn onto a logging road, and end up lost as the sun sets. Then coyotes begin to sing from the ridge above. The speaker describes their overlapping voices as neither dissonant nor harmonious, something messier and more interesting than either.
That description quietly echoes the two friends' own disagreement. Their quarrel and the coyotes' tangled music both suggest that voices can coexist without agreeing. The closing three-line haiku shifts the mood from tension to calm. "No longer lost" feels like a release, and the "hole in the clouds" offers a small patch of light on the far slope. The poem doesn't say whether the friends settled their argument. Instead it leaves a sense of quiet relief, as if the wild chorus helped them find their bearings, both on the trail and perhaps with each other.