The title, "Acedia," names a kind of spiritless boredom, and the poem lives inside that feeling. The speaker looks back on twenty years of daydreaming and sees them as a set of glass beads on an abacus, slid along one by one with no energy or purpose. The words themselves drift down the page to match that slow counting. Some memories are so fragile they shatter when touched, and the pieces vanish into forgetting.
Meanwhile the day fades. The sunset colours blur into one another, leaving a blue twilight and a hidden moon. The comparison to a widower leaving flowers at a secret lover's grave is striking: it suggests grief that has to stay private, a loss no one is supposed to see.
By the end, the "frayed remains" can only stare at the broken glass, stuck in a present with nothing in it. The final image, a skeleton with hollow bones, leaves a mood of numbness, regret and quiet emptiness.