Four short lines and a title that sounds like an entry in a household manual: Dave Bonta's "Uses" promises a list of what things are for. The first three items keep that promise in a comfortable, almost domestic way. Water makes rain, broth is for drinking, love fills an afternoon. Then the last line breaks the pattern. The sea's use is "to be absent." The central idea sits in that turn: something can be useful precisely by not being there, and absence is something we live with and put to work, just as we do with presence.
Even the first line plays with our expectations. We normally say rain is made of water, not that water is used to make rain. The sentence turns the cycle around so that water becomes a tool and rain its product. "Broth to drink" is the plainest line, only three syllables, a sip of a line. It is water changed by cooking into something warm and nourishing. Then comes "love to fill up the afternoon," the longest line by far, at eight syllables. It stretches to occupy more room, as an afternoon does. Love here is not grand passion but something modest, a way of occupying ordinary hours. The verb "fill" also hints that the afternoon would otherwise be empty, and that emptiness is what the final line names outright.
The construction is strict. Every line follows the same grammar: a noun, the word "to," a verb. There is no rhyme, no punctuation, and no capital letters, so nothing decorates the statements. The syllable counts run 5, 3, 8, 5, uneven enough to feel like speech rather than a formal pattern, yet the repeated grammar gives the poem the matter-of-fact tone of a dictionary or a shopping list. That firmness is what makes the ending land. "To make," "to drink" and "to fill up" are all verbs of action, things done with water, broth and love. "To be" is a verb of state. The sea is asked to do nothing, and the poem then takes even that away by making it "absent."
The sounds help. "Sea to be absent" opens with two long *e* vowels, "sea" and "be," which roll like a swell. Then "absent" closes the line, and the poem, on a hiss and a clipped *nt*, so the last word seems to fade out as it is spoken. The poem ends on the very word that means nothing is there.
Water also frames the poem. It appears openly in the first line, hides inside the broth, and returns in the last line as its largest form, the sea. Love sits in the middle as the only abstraction among things you can hold in a cup or watch fall from the sky. The sea is the biggest and most elemental item on the list, and it is the one that is missing. Why it is absent, the poem does not say. It could be distance, as if the speaker lives far from any coast. It could be longing, with the sea valued as something missed. It could even be a space deliberately left open. Judging by the wording alone, all of these are possible, and the poem prefers it that way.
The title adds to the ambiguity. "Uses" can mean practical purposes, but it can also suggest habits or the ways we make do. If absence has a use, it may be to define what is present: the broth tastes warmer, the afternoon needs filling, and the rain matters more, because the sea is not there to be taken for granted.
The poem is worth reading for how much it gets from so little. It sets up a pattern, lets us settle into it, and then breaks it with a single line that turns a list of comforts into a quiet reflection on loss, distance or longing. Nothing in it is difficult, and that is how it works. A reader who expects one more simple use is caught by the paradox of the final line and left to supply their own sea.