A letter arrives from a former lover, and the speaker responds by turning the landscape into a record of their past. The desert imagery does the heavy lifting: the marks on arroyo walls show how long the dry years have lasted, while the memory of the two of them is a flash flood, wild and muddy, when everything seemed to bloom at once. After that came dust, which filled even their footprints and left the ground smooth and empty, like skin no one touches anymore.
Then her voice arrives like a cool breeze or a little moisture, coaxing something dormant to stir. The speaker is hopeful but wary. New shoots rarely survive harsh sun, and the poem admits this plainly. Still, it ends tenderly, at night, when a "soft-lipped moment" reaches toward the moon. The mood is wistful and quietly longing, with desire cautiously waking up rather than roaring back.