Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Bob Hicok’s "Absence" is a meditation on the vastness of existence, the paradox of emptiness, and the ways in which the human mind attempts to quantify, understand, and transcend the unseeable. The poem moves seamlessly between physics and personal longing, between scientific rigor and the ineffable pull of mystery. Through a shifting, sometimes playful, sometimes melancholic voice, Hicok explores the interplay between intellectual pursuit and emotional absence, suggesting that what we seek in equations and the universe’s hidden structures may ultimately be the same thing we search for in ourselves.

The poem begins with a wry observation: “There are men and women huddled in rooms / discussing dark matter, the non-stuff, the anti-things which fill the universe.” The scientific premise is clear—dark matter, the invisible mass believed to make up much of the cosmos, is paradoxically defined by its absence, by the fact that it cannot be seen or directly measured. Hicok’s use of "non-stuff" and "anti-things" adds a humorous, colloquial tone to this otherwise esoteric concept, making it feel both absurd and relatable. The next line extends this absurdity: “Imagine writing that grant.” In just four words, Hicok undercuts the grandiosity of the subject with a bureaucratic reality check, reducing the pursuit of cosmic truth to the mundane process of securing funding.

The poem then shifts to the personal details of these scientists’ lives: “Their children are of relatively specific dimension, their houses occupy nearly calculable space. Seven have dogs.” The contrast between their theoretical work—concerned with the immeasurable—and the concrete facts of their domestic lives is both comedic and poignant. These physicists, tasked with solving cosmic mysteries, live in definable, ordinary realities. The specificity of "Seven have dogs." is particularly striking—why do we need to know this? The detail is simultaneously random and grounding, emphasizing the incongruity between their daily lives and their abstract pursuits.

A sudden surreal aside follows: “One dreams of playing in the British Open nude. Yes, exactly like your father.” This unexpected insertion of a personal or imagined detail breaks the pattern of observation and adds a moment of psychological layering. The humor of the image—golf, with its rigid etiquette, made absurdly intimate—collapses the distance between the scientists and the reader. The reference to "your father" adds another layer, as if addressing the reader directly, pulling them into the poem’s play of memory and absurdity.

The poem then focuses on a particular scientist: “Of special interest is the woman in an office in Princeton in a swivel chair / looking through a window at the pond where Einstein’s said to have sat and thought about sailboats.” This woman, who studies the mass of everything, is placed in a lineage of thinkers—Einstein himself once sat in this very place, pondering motion and relativity through the image of small sailboats. The transition from cosmic scale to this intimate setting sharpens the poem’s exploration of how vast questions find their way into individual moments of contemplation.

Then comes the intrusion of an unrelated but strangely consuming thought: “She whispers Bolivia, a word she caught on a map earlier and hasn’t been able to shake.” The randomness of "Bolivia" becomes a focal point, a sound that lingers in her mind for no apparent reason. This fixation suggests that even the most disciplined intellect is vulnerable to distraction, to an irrational attachment to sound and meaning beyond logic. The description of "Bolivia" as something she "hasn't been able to shake" suggests it carries more than just curiosity—it has a hold on her, like an incantation or an unspoken desire.

The poem playfully links her attraction to the word with sensuality: “What she likes about the word Bolivia / beside the sexual things it does to the tongue / is her feeling that anything you do there might cause people to dance.” The phrase "sexual things it does to the tongue" highlights the pleasure of language itself, the physical act of speaking certain words. But it is also about movement—Bolivia evokes an imagined place of uninhibited celebration, the opposite of her rigid intellectual work. This contrast between control (the calculations of mass and energy) and abandon (dance, physicality, spontaneity) underscores the poem’s central tension.

As she fantasizes about dancing, she abruptly returns to her work: “she is striding to the board and brushing away a series of calculations / and replacing them with another, more elegant run.” The act of clearing the board and rewriting suggests both an intellectual breakthrough and a form of artistic expression. The addition of "the curlicue of infinity which normalizes the equation" is particularly striking—this small mathematical symbol momentarily makes everything make sense, as if infinity itself provides balance to an otherwise chaotic attempt to quantify existence.

What follows is a breathtaking shift in scale: “which makes her noodling momentarily right with God / and explains how a pinhole could have the density of a universe, / how half of Jupiter could lie balled in your shoe.” Here, science and spirituality converge. The poet equates the satisfaction of a correct equation with a fleeting harmony with the divine, suggesting that understanding the universe—even momentarily—feels like touching something sacred. The imagery of scale distortion—"a pinhole with the density of a universe," "half of Jupiter in your shoe"—reinforces the poem’s meditation on presence and absence, on how vastness and intimacy coexist.

Then comes a moment of shared revelation: “Bolivia, she says, spinning. Bolivia, she repeats, grabbing Bill Morrison by the collar. / Bolivia, he answers.” The word, now a kind of mantra, becomes a point of connection between the woman and her colleague. Bill Morrison embraces the strangeness of the moment, "knowing it's just made chalk beautiful, aligned the glyphs of mass and spin into a schematic of everything." This suggests that even within rigorous scientific work, there are flashes of irrational beauty, where words and symbols momentarily align into something resembling meaning.

Yet just as she revels in this moment, the poem undercuts it with a realization: “Then briefly, looking over his shoulder at the board, she realizes in essence she’s trapped nothing.” The scientific breakthrough is illusory—what she has captured is absence itself, the "black leading between the light." This echoes the study of dark matter introduced at the poem’s start; she has spent her time mapping the unseen, quantifying the void rather than the stars themselves.

The poem ends on an emotional note, linking cosmic absence to personal longing: "the same absence she feels at night when looking up / a force like wind rises through her body, leaving no trace except the need to be surrounded." The scientific quest for dark matter, for understanding what cannot be seen, is mirrored in her own feeling of loneliness, the "need to be surrounded." The implication is profound: what we seek in the universe is often what we lack in ourselves. The vast emptiness she studies is not just an external reality but an internal experience.

"Absence" masterfully entwines scientific exploration with human emotion, demonstrating how the search for meaning—whether through physics, language, or relationships—is ultimately an attempt to bridge the gaps between what is known and unknown, seen and unseen, present and lost. The poem’s humor, playfulness, and moments of ecstatic revelation make its final realization all the more poignant: no matter how elegantly we calculate, no matter how many theories we build, we are always reaching into the dark, craving connection, longing to be surrounded.

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