Acedia is an old word for a particular kind of tiredness. It is not the weariness that follows hard work but the numbness of no longer caring whether anything is done. Writers of the Middle Ages counted it among the spiritual dangers, and the title carries that weight before the first line begins. The poem then does something cleverer than describing apathy. It lets apathy set the pace, so that the reader feels the slowness and the thinning-out as well as understanding them.
The central image is an abacus. "Two daydream decades" (twenty years, if we take the phrase literally) have become "frayed remains" that "listlessly" slide glass beads along a rod. The tool of accounting has become a toy, and nothing is being added up. The line breaks make the point physically. "One / by / one" steps down and across the page, each word pushed a little further from the margin, like a bead nudged along. The sibilance of "slides glass beads across" adds a soft, dragging hiss to the movement. Glass is a good choice of material because it is pretty, fragile and transparent. Some beads are "so delicate that they break / upon contact," and the shards are "lost to the permanence of / forgetting." The phrase is a small paradox, since forgetting is usually something we think of as fading, not as lasting. Here it is the one thing that does not wear away.
The middle of the poem turns to the sky. "The day walks away toward the West" makes the day a person quietly leaving the room, and the sunset colours "elide" one another, which means they slur and blur together. That verb works for memory as well as for light. The "blue creeping twilight / & shrouded moon" has the same unhurried advance as the listlessness of the opening, and "creeping" gives the dusk something faintly sinister. Then comes the poem's strangest comparison. The twilight is left behind "like / a widower leaves flowers / at the grave of a secret lover." The simile is carefully built. A widower's grief would be public, but this grief belongs to a hidden love and must be shown without being named. Judging by the imagery, the poem suggests that the lost years were also a lost possibility, something mourned privately and never admitted. The poem does not explain it, and that restraint makes it more affecting.
After this the beads seem to acquire a mind. The "frayed remains" are "ignorant of all but their game" and "see nothing but the broken glass." The poem tightens around this self-absorption. Stanzas shorten, and the word "trapped" sits alone on its line, boxed in by white space. The "present moment" is "empty of all content," and "content" is a quiet double meaning, since it can be the contents of a life or the feeling of contentment. Both are missing.
The final image is "a skeleton / with hollow bones." It closes a circle with the opening, because bones are what "remains" after a body is gone. A skeleton is already emptied of flesh, and these bones are hollow as well, so the emptiness is doubled. The line is short, flat and final, and nothing follows it.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The line lengths vary, and the ampersands and scattered indentations give the page a loose, almost dissolving look. That choice suits the subject. A tidy rhyme scheme would suggest order and purpose, which is exactly what the speaker lacks. The free verse lets sentences trail, stall and restart. Early on they run long and winding, and by the end they have shrunk to fragments.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal to be dramatic. It contains no crisis, only a slow draining, and its images (beads, dusk, flowers, bones) are small and quiet enough to be believable. It also quietly suggests that the worst thing about acedia may not be pain but the absence of it, a present so empty that even grief would be a kind of company.