Five lines, and the first is already a riddle. "Where is my absence?" Absence is, by definition, the thing that isn't anywhere, yet Dave Bonta's speaker asks after it as if it were a mislaid umbrella. The question turns a lack into an object, something that might be found and brought back. The title carries the same ambiguity. "Missing" can describe a person who has disappeared, the ache of longing for someone, or the plain failure to find something. The poem seems to use all three at once.
The next two lines try to explain. "My house is virginal; / I could not stay with myself." Virginal is a strange word for a house. It suggests rooms nobody has marked, with no dents in the cushions and no sign of a life lived there. The speaker has left so completely that the place looks as if no one ever stayed. The word also hints at a purity that has gone sterile, because a house this untouched is a house without warmth. Then comes the confession, which is both ordinary and odd. People say they can't bear their own company, but here the phrase is taken almost literally. The self splits into one part that leaves and one that is unbearable to live with. That split may be why the absence can't be located: the speaker is both the one who has gone missing and the one searching.
The poem then turns outward. "Cold water went home to ice / and wind to a rose bed." After the domestic, inward lines we get weather and garden, where everything knows where it belongs. The key phrase is "went home." Water returns to its stiller form and wind settles among flowers, so the elements are given the very thing the speaker lacks, a destination. The two images pull in different directions. Ice is hard and still, while a rose bed is soft and fragrant, though roses have thorns. The poem never says whether the speaker's disappearance is a freezing or a softening, a loss of feeling or a kind of rest. "Bed" also faintly echoes "virginal," so the house and the garden share a quiet vocabulary of sleep and untouched space.
The poem has no end rhyme at all: absence, virginal, myself, ice and bed make no pattern. The lines are short, running by my count from five to seven syllables (5, 6, 7, 7, 6, if "virginal" takes three), so they swell and then ease back like a breath. The music is inward. The opening "Where" is echoed in "water," "went" and "wind," as though the question keeps sounding in the answer. The long o of "cold," "home" and "rose" gives the closing image a rounded, settling sound, which sets the elements' calm against the speaker's restlessness. Then the short, flat "bed" ends the poem without a flourish.
The most telling structure is in the grammar. The first three lines are crowded with the speaker: "my," "my," "I," "myself." In the last two lines the first person is gone. No "I" or "my" appears, and nature takes over the sentence. Even the syntax has a hole in it. "And wind to a rose bed" has no verb of its own and borrows "went" from the line above, so the final clause is itself missing something. The poem therefore doesn't only describe absence. It lets the speaker drain out of the sentences.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It gives a hard-to-name feeling a shape without naming it. Judging by the text alone, it could be grief, depression, restlessness or a more philosophical sense of not being at home in oneself, and the poem commits to none of them. It leaves the opening question unanswered, which hands the searching to the reader. In five short lines the speaker slips out of the house, out of the pronouns and out of the poem, and the reader is left in the clean, empty rooms, looking for something that was never there to be found.