A small domestic moment opens the poem: the speaker finds a silverfish in the sink while rinsing a cup, and lets the water wash it down the drain. The insect gets two quick, odd labels, "wayward eyelash" and "eater of books," which make it sound both tiny and faintly literary. The title adds a wry joke about the world's smallest violin, the phrase for mock sympathy, as if the speaker is half-aware of how trivial this little death is.
Yet the feeling doesn't go away. All day the speaker is "dogged by a vague anxiety," and the poem compares it to a missing end parenthesis, the sense that something was opened and never closed. The final image is a small hole through the page with an italic f just visible beyond. The poem suggests that a bookish creature has been eaten out of the text, or that a small guilt is left hanging. The mood is quiet, wry and slightly unsettled, a minor event that lingers longer than it should.