Cold water that shows nothing back: that is where Dave Bonta begins "Absence", and the rest of the poem behaves like that water. Water usually returns something to us, such as a face, a skyline, a sky. Here it comes "without relections". The word is printed that way, and it reads like a slip for "reflections", though that is an inference. Either way, the next stanza makes the meaning plain: "look / not me / nor the harbor". The speaker tells us to look and then lists what we will not find, neither the speaker nor the harbor. The line is ambiguous. It could mean "what you see is not me" or "don't look for me", and the poem doesn't choose. Either way, we are staring into a surface that has been emptied.
The poem's construction is as spare as its subject. It has four tercets, twelve lines, no rhyme, no capitals and no punctuation. Most lines run only two to four syllables, so the poem moves in short breaths, and the reader has to supply the pauses. The longest line, "I dine at a good table", is the one place where the rhythm settles into something like comfort, and the next lines undercut it. "With one little" ends on an adjective left hanging, and "dish at a time" arrives only after the break. The enjambment makes us wait for the small portion, which suits an image of rationing.
Sound holds the poem together where rhyme might have. The first stanza is threaded with w sounds: "water", "without", "Wednesday". The last two stanzas shift to d: "dine", "dish", "dinner", "down", "dirt". The change is subtle, but the poem moves from a liquid, slippery opening to a harder, more thudding close. It ends on "dirt", a single blunt syllable with no punctuation after it, so the poem stops rather than concludes.
The central images are all domestic and all slightly wrong. "Wednesday" is the most ordinary day imaginable, the middle of the week, and placing the cold water there makes absence feel routine rather than dramatic. The dinner looks like a pleasure at first. A "good table" suggests comfort, but "I dine" is a formal verb with no guest in sight, and the "one little dish at a time" could mean contentment, discipline or loneliness. The poem doesn't say which, and judging by its restraint, it doesn't want to. A table for one, served in small portions, is enough to suggest a life lived in careful measure.
The ending takes us "down to the cellar / without dirt". A cellar is where earth, roots and stored things belong, and in many poems a descent promises depth. Here the expected substance is taken away. We go down and find a place stripped of its earthiness, either sterile or hollow. The word "without" now appears for the second time, and it frames the poem like a pair of bookends: it opens with water lacking reflections and closes with a cellar lacking dirt. Between them, "not" and "nor" keep the pattern going. Almost every concrete thing in the poem is introduced only so something can be removed from it.
That method is what makes the poem worth reading. Bonta never writes "I am lonely" or "someone is gone". He gives us water, a harbor, a meal, a cellar, and takes one essential quality from each. Absence becomes something we feel by noticing what ought to be there. The small, plain objects make it more convincing than an abstract statement of loss could, because we recognise a cold, empty midweek evening without being told how to feel about it.
The poem is also a good lesson in how much a reader contributes. Its compression is a little like haiku, and its few words leave large gaps. What does the speaker's missing reflection mean? Why is the cellar clean? Each reader will fill those spaces differently, and that openness is the point. The title promises absence, and the poem delivers it by leaving us at the bottom of the stairs, looking at the place where something should be.