Jerry Kraft's poem arrives the way its letter does: slowly, from far off, and as weather before it is anything else. Before we learn what the letter holds, we see an "empty sky" and "a night shadow dragging its feet / behind a wandering cloud." A former lover has written, and that small event sets off a chain of memory. The speaker recalls a passionate past, the long dry years since, and a faint new stirring in the present. The central idea is that feeling thought dead can revive, but only briefly and precariously. The poem accepts this without bitterness and finds value in the fragile moment itself.
Everything is carried by one sustained image: love as desert country. An arroyo is a dry gully that fills only when a storm breaks, and its walls keep the marks of past floods. Kraft's "striations" work like tree rings, a record of "arid years" laid down layer by layer. The lovers are not simply compared to the landscape. They are inside it, "muddied in erotic torrents of cloudburst," feeling "new roots suck each tender drop." The sensuality is physical and slightly messy, with mud, roots and a "blush / of new life erupting in passionate colors."
The vocabulary then drains away. "Vagrant dust" fills "every hollow footprint," and the land is left "smooth, dry surfaces like unstroked flesh." That last simile is the poem's saddest turn. The landscape becomes a body, and what it misses is touch. The word "vagrant" also echoes the earlier "wandering cloud," so the forces that scour the past and the letter that disturbs it are both drifters. Nothing here is fixed or settled.
The present arrives on a smaller scale than the past. Where there were torrents, there is now "a breeze of her voice," "a kind moisture." The letter has turned into a voice, and the voice into air, so the poem stays in its weather metaphor while moving closer to a person. Two words link past and present. "Tender" describes the drops of the flood and later the "tender shoots," and "new" appears in "new roots" and "new life" before returning as the idea of "dormant life" waking. The poem hints that this is the old feeling coming back, not a different one.
The form suits this restraint. The poem runs to fourteen lines, the length of a sonnet, but it has no rhyme and its stanzas fall 4-3-4-3, as if the expected pattern had been worn away like the footprints. Most lines run to around eleven syllables, long enough to feel unhurried, and the rhythm is conversational. The punctuation is revealing. There are only three sentences, and the second runs seven lines. It stops on "since we," at a line end, so the pair is separated by the very break that follows. Sound does quiet work too. Hard d's gather through the dry passages ("drifted," "dragging," "dust," "dry," "dormant," "desiccating," "dark"). The last line softens into m's and l's: "a soft-lipped moment reaches up for the moon."
That ending holds the poem's whole attitude. The participle "knowing" admits the speaker's clear-sightedness: such shoots "rarely survive / the desiccating sun." Notice that it says "rarely," not "never." Survival is possible but unlikely, and the poem chooses the moon over the sun. Daylight is harsh and drying, while "night's dark forgiveness" shelters what could not live in the open. Judging by the imagery, that forgiveness may reach the wasted years as well as the risk of hoping. "Soft-lipped" suggests a kiss, and the hope is for a moment, not a future.
The poem is worth reading for its restraint and discipline. A letter from an old lover could easily have produced regret or sentimental reunion. Kraft instead keeps to one image system from the first line to the last and lets small changes in scale carry the emotion, from flood to breeze, from torrent to drop. The title's "old" can mean former, and it can also mean aged. Either way, the poem suggests that late feeling is quieter than early passion and just as real.