Equal To: Not True Poem by Frank Avon

A moth, a scrap, a snake.

First, I have to say:
I had just finished reading ten postmodern poems today,
poems that mean to be
poems that do not mean to mean,
or that disguise what they mean to mean
as unmeaning
so as to appear to the postmodern elite
not to mean but be.

I closed the book,
and looked for the two large rubber bands
I bind around the paperback book
with my right hand
to keep its corners from crumpling.
You get what I mean?


* * * * *

Dark has fallen.
I snap on a light
on our redwood deck,
which is not really redwood
but wood stained red.
Such are the fictions we live amid.

A moth, its wings outspread,
its thorax up, obviously dead.

A piece of paper wadded up
a breeze could sweep away with one puff.

Two large rubber bands scrambled together
like two little snakes in a nest without a mother.

On the redwood bench,
in the pale electric light,
they're all three one and the same,
as I approach them / it
clarifying what I see with my dimmed eyesight.
Meaning is never a cinch
to lose, to seek, to claim.

Meaninglessness one can forgive.
Dismembering meaning is no way to live.
A dead moth is not
a scrap of paper or
rubber bands lost.

To clarify:
wings that can fly
only on a breeze passing by
or wiggly worms having sex
are, for poetry, merely PRE-text.

Poetry, at first, is seeing,
meaning comes next:
the meaning is the text.