The speaker looks at a world divided by distance and defensiveness. The opening image of cold fields "between us" makes people feel far apart, and the locks and keys that follow suggest we work hard, almost endlessly, to keep love away. Even closeness seems damaged: touch happens only inside the family, among brothers, sisters, husbands and wives, and it comes "full of sour years together." Intimacy here is real but bruised by habit and resentment.
Then the poem turns to the speaker's own body. The "great round gut / like a gold watch" is a funny, self-mocking picture, but it also links his aging body to time and value. The final lines suggest he carries something like a pregnancy, a way "to let an inconceivable / time be born." The title hints that this hope belongs to someone worn by long struggle. The mood is wry and weary, yet quietly hopeful: the speaker imagines a future beyond the cold and the locks, even if he can't yet picture it.