Nobody speaks in «overworked». A woman looks at a man, and the poem is simply what she sees: tired wrinkles around his eyes, skin gone pale, gnarled hands, shoulders that no longer seem able to hold mountains. He is never named, but "incapable of holding hers again" hints at an old tenderness. A parent, perhaps, whose hand once closed around a child's, though that is an inference and the text never says so. What the poem builds toward is a quiet grief. Work, or time, or both, has worn a person down, and the one who loves him can only watch.
The construction does much of the emotional work. The poem is essentially one long sentence, strung together with semicolons and a dash, and the opening has no main verb at all. "The tired wrinkles around his eyes; pronounced against the paleness of his skin; gnarled hands..." reads like an inventory, or a slow pan across a face, with each detail added before the last one has settled. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The lack of capital letters, even in the lowercase title, gives the whole piece the slackness of something too tired to stand up straight. The lack of full stops until the very end means the reader never gets to rest, which is exactly her predicament: she can't stop looking, and she can't stop noticing.
The imagery moves between the human and the geological. "Tired wrinkles" is a transferred description, since the tiredness belongs to the man and not to the lines on his face, yet it makes his exhaustion visible on the skin. "Pronounced against the paleness" leans on its repeated p sounds, so the wrinkles stand out like marks pressed into paper. "Gnarled" is a word for old wood, and it quietly turns his hands into something weathered by outdoor years. Then come the mountains. To a child, a parent's shoulders can seem to carry everything, and the poem keeps that childlike scale, only to set the ruin beside it: "battered broken yet still standing." The missing comma lets the two adjectives slide together, and "standing" is left as the last scrap of dignity. The grammar of "his shoulders no longer look like it can hold mountains" slips slightly, from plural shoulders to singular "it". It reads as speech rather than polished writing, as if feeling has outrun correctness.
The most striking choice is "relentlessly disfigured." "Disfigured" is usually a word for injury or accident, and applying it to the slow work of time makes ageing sound like an assault. "Relentlessly" is long and slow, and it stretches the sentence out just as the process stretches out. Then "heart and soul" lands at the end of the line. It is normally an idiom of devotion, as in giving something your heart and soul. Placed here, it can mean that he is disfigured in heart and soul, or that heart and soul are what he spent. Both readings suit a poem called «overworked», where being used up and giving everything turn out to be the same thing.
After that the sentence breaks apart. "And" sits alone on a line, a hesitation like a breath before saying something hard. Then "she wishes / things were different," in the plainest words in the poem. The shift from "wonders" to "wishes" matters: she begins by asking a question and ends by admitting she can do nothing. "Things" is deliberately vague. She has no culprit to name, no employer, no illness, no single cause, and the lack of one makes the helplessness feel true.
The poem is slight in length but not in effect. It makes its form mimic its subject, with a sentence that piles up, runs out of breath, and collapses into a short, quiet wish. And because the title says "overworked" and not "aged," the grief is pushed slightly beyond one family. This isn't only time doing its ordinary damage. Something has been taken from him by labour, and the poem asks the reader to look at that cost as steadily as she does.