The title does a good deal of work before the first line begins. "Bookwormhole" fuses two creatures of the imagination: the bookworm, a pest that eats a tunnel through paper, and the wormhole, the theorist's shortcut through space. Both are passages bored through something solid, and both promise arrival somewhere else. Reading, the pun suggests, is at once a small, hungry, almost bodily act and a leap across enormous distances. The poem that follows is only five lines long, but it keeps that double scale.
The opening, "entering my book / where to be gone to," bends ordinary grammar. We expect "where to go." Instead we get "be gone to," which makes the traveller someone things happen to. "Gone" also carries the sense of vanishing, of being absent from the room, even from life. The line ends on a stranded "to," a preposition with nothing after it, so the destination never arrives. The ambiguity of "my book" fits this. It could be a volume the speaker owns or one the speaker is merely inhabiting, and the poem doesn't settle which. What matters is that the speaker enters without a map, and the question of where this leads is left open.
The second stanza turns from place to people: "who among others to love / in their poor varnish." The phrase "among others" makes the book feel crowded, a place with a population from which one must choose. Then comes the odd, memorable "poor varnish." Varnish is a thin, glossy coat meant to protect and beautify a surface, and over time it yellows and cracks. Calling it "poor" can mean shabby or inadequate, but it also has a note of pity, almost tenderness. The people in the book, and perhaps the people outside it, are seen only through their surfaces, and the poem asks how to love anyone through such a flawed finish. Characters are made of words, so they are all varnish in one sense. Real people, we only ever see from the outside too.
The last stanza is a single line, "how to see at night." It is the poem's shortest unit and its final dark note. Reading often happens at night, by a lamp or in bed, but the line widens quickly into something larger: how to see when the usual light is gone, how to find your way through what cannot be understood. The title quietly answers it. A worm has no use for eyes, and it moves through darkness by chewing forward. Seeing at night may mean exactly this kind of patient, tactile progress rather than a flood of illumination.
The construction is spare. There is no rhyme, no punctuation, and no capital letter anywhere. Four of the five lines run to exactly five syllables, a steady little pulse, and the exception is the line about love, "who among others to love," which stretches to seven as though affection cannot be fitted into the small measure. The poem has no finite verb at all. Everything hangs on infinitives: "to be gone to," "to love," "to see." The word "to" appears four times in five lines, and each time it points toward an action that has not yet happened. The questions have no question marks, so they read less like worries than like items on a syllabus, or notes a reader makes to themselves on the threshold. The stanzas taper from two lines to two to one, like a tunnel narrowing as it goes deeper.
The poem's significance lies in how much it refuses to say. It makes no claim that books console or educate or rescue. It treats reading as an apprenticeship in uncertainty, in which even the destination, the object of love and the means of sight must be worked out from inside. In five short lines it manages to be playful in its title, tender in its "poor varnish," and unsettling in its closing darkness, and it leaves the reader standing at the mouth of the same tunnel it describes.