Six short lines, and almost nothing in them is present. That is the quiet trick of "In absentia", a Latin phrase meaning "in absence", best known from law, where a trial can go ahead without the accused in the room. Dave Bonta carries the phrase from the courtroom to the graveyard and gives us a burial where the mourners, the meaning and perhaps even the dead woman herself have failed to turn up.
The poem opens with a paradox: "dead before her death". There is no name, no cause and no setting, only "her", so the poem never says how a person can die ahead of her own dying. Illness, loneliness and a life that nobody noticed are all possible, and the poem leaves the choice to us. What it does offer is an image: "hands as spare as any in a compass". The line works in several ways. Compass hands are needles, thin and exact, and "spare" suggests both lean and left over. A needle points but never grasps, so these are hands that indicate and cannot hold. "Compass" also means range or reach in everyday English, so the line may hint that her reach has shrunk almost to nothing. This is the longest line in the poem, about ten syllables, and everything after it gets thinner.
The second couplet turns on a grammatical gap: "at her own dark burial / finding nobody". Who is finding? The sentence has no clear subject, so the participle hangs in the air. We can read it as the dead woman attending her own funeral and looking round for company, or as the hands themselves searching. Either way "nobody" sits exactly where we expect a noun for the mourners, so the poem fills their place with a word that means no one. "Dark" is literal, since she is underground, but it also suggests a ceremony without light, warmth or witnesses. And "her own" makes it worse. The burial belongs to her, yet she is not its host, only one more absence at it.
The last couplet is the most carefully built. "paper looking for paper" and "a door open to a door" have the same shape, thing, relation, thing, and each runs to about seven syllables. The poem has no rhyme. Its only echoes are repetitions, as if the world has shrunk to things finding copies of themselves. Paper is thin like the hands, and it is also what outlasts a person: certificates, notices, records. Read that way, the line says that what remains of her is paperwork, and paperwork can only recognise more paperwork. The doors are stranger. A door is meant to open onto a room or a person, but here one opens onto another door, like two mirrors facing each other. It is a welcome with no guest, a passage with no destination, and a threshold that leads only to more threshold. With the burial, it gives the idea of an afterlife nothing to rest on.
Small choices of form add to the effect. Everything is lowercase and there is not one punctuation mark, so no sentence ever closes and the poem seems to leave off rather than end. The gaps between couplets work like the pauses in an empty room. Sound keeps a faint pulse running under the whole thing: the hard d of "dead", "death", "dark" and "door" returns like a knock on wood, or on a lid.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it takes away. Elegies usually gather people around a loss, with a name, a memory and a consoling turn at the end. Here the name, the mourners and the consolation are all withheld, and the reader is left in the same empty space as the woman. The poem asks, without asking aloud, who will be at our deaths, and what will stand in for us if no one is. Its answer is unsettling in its plainness: paper, and doors that open onto doors.