"Touchstoner" is a word that looks invented, and the poem's first job is to make us puzzle over it. A touchstone is a dark stone once used to test gold: you rubbed the metal against it and read the streak. The word has also come to mean any standard we measure things against. Adding "-er" turns the object into a person, someone who handles such stones, or perhaps someone who keeps going back to one. The ending also lets a looser, more modern word slip in, and I suspect the poem wants that ambiguity. Whatever the word means exactly, it sets up the question the six lines then pursue: what happens when the thing we measure our lives against turns out to be too small to see by?
The answer comes in a single unpunctuated sentence, spread over three couplets. The speaker's touchstone is "the little moment / I was dug out of." The image is odd and strong. To be "dug out" is to be excavated like ore or an artifact, and also to be rescued, as from rubble or a collapsed tunnel. It could even point toward birth or some founding experience, though the poem never says which. The moment becomes a pit or quarry, and the speaker something hauled up from it. The word "little" matters here. It is affectionate, but it also shrinks the origin to a size that can't carry much weight.
Then the metaphor changes under our feet. The moment is no longer a hole in the ground but "a poor candle with which / to travel in the dark." The shift from stone to flame suits the touchstone idea, since a touchstone is for testing and a candle is for seeing, and the poem says the origin fails at both. The adjective "poor" cuts two ways, meaning feeble and also impoverished. A candle is a humble tool anyway, and a poor one is barely there. The long, drawn-out phrasing of "with which / to travel" makes the journey feel slow, with the light flickering at the edge of each step.
The last couplet brings in a place and a "we": "the city where we danced / beyond all moderation." Until now the poem has been solitary and inward, and here it suddenly opens onto a crowd, or at least a pair, and onto noise and motion. Its grammar is slippery. The city could be the darkness the speaker is crossing now, with the dancing in the past. Or the dancing could be what the speaker is walking back through. The poem doesn't settle this, and I think it is better unsettled. Either way, the city is the real subject, and the candle is measured against it. A small, quiet beginning can't light up a place that was lived in so wildly.
The sound of the poem supports this. There is no rhyme and no capital letter, and the missing punctuation lets the sentence run on like the walk it describes. The lines lengthen, from five syllables in "the little moment" to seven in "beyond all moderation," so that the poem seems to expand as the speaker's attention moves from the self to the city. The sounds connect things too. The hard *d* of "dug," "dark" and "danced" threads the three couplets together, linking the burial, the blackness and the revelry. "Moment" and "moderation" echo each other at the start and end, one the tiniest unit of time and the other a word for restraint. Ending on "moderation," a long, prim, Latinate word, after "beyond all," is a quiet joke. The word for restraint is the last thing we hear, and it has been overrun.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It suggests that where we began cannot guide us through what we later become, and that a life of excess is too big for any small, original light. It doesn't say whether this is sad or freeing, and the reader has to decide. The dancing is a memory the speaker clearly treasures, the dark is real, and the candle is poor. Holding those three facts together without comment is what gives the poem its pull.