The poem begins as a childhood memory of hide-and-seek. The speaker dives under a tarp, hears a beetle scrabbling near his ear, and stays hidden as the seeker runs past. Then she returns, slowly, and he holds his breath. She stops at the tarp's edge and says, "Nobody under there." She is wrong, and he lets her be.
In the final stanza the game seems to become something larger. The silence after her words "has yet to end," and the speaker now imagines himself a "carcass" with a harvestman crawling over him. That suggests that his success at hiding cost him something, perhaps a connection he never got back. The fishing question, about luck versus the "inevitable by-catch," hints that being found, or missing, both carry a price. The mood is quiet, eerie and regretful. The closing image of a mountain between smooth sky and tangled earth leaves him stuck between the two, still waiting.