The title is a small joke at the reader's expense. The phrase most people know is "pathetic fallacy," the habit of giving nature human feelings, as when the sky weeps or the wind sulks. Dave Bonta swaps one word and gets "poetic fallacy," which suggests that the mistake isn't confined to weather. It may belong to poetry itself. The five lines that follow read like a confession of what that mistake looks like.
The first line sets a job description: "My office: wit." The colon works like an equals sign, so the speaker's role and wit are the same thing. "Office" has a double edge. It can mean a duty or post, but the word also has an older sense of a prescribed religious service, and the next line, "I chant, I talk," fits that reading. Chanting is ritual, almost liturgical, while talking is casual and human. Between them the speaker covers the range of what a poet does, from incantation to conversation. The repeated "I" and the matching clauses give the line the stiff rhythm of a man reciting his own credentials.
Then the poem slows down. "Of the weight of age" is the only line with five syllables, and it is also the heaviest in meaning. After the quick, light word "wit," the weight arrives like a load set down. Wit is nimble and age is ponderous, and the speaker sets them side by side without comment. Judging by the wording, the chanting and talking are about ageing, about the burden of years and perhaps of the past. That is a natural subject for a poet, and the poem suggests it is also a trap.
The trap is sprung in the last two lines: "and where I err / is the present." The grammar is slippery, and that suits the idea. "Err" is close kin to "fallacy," so the title's accusation comes back as a verb. "Err" also carries its older sense of wandering, so the line can be read two ways: the present is where I make my mistake, or the present is where I stray. Either way, the speaker has been so busy discussing age that he has lost touch with the moment he is actually in. The poem never says this outright. It does it, because the lines spend their length on "the weight of age" and only reach the present at the very end, in a few words that arrive almost too late. "Present" has a second meaning as well, a gift, which hints at what is being missed.
Formally the poem is lean. Almost every word is a single syllable, and "office" and "present" are the only exceptions. Most lines run to four syllables, and the one five-syllable line is the one about weight. There is no end rhyme, but the sounds echo quietly. "Weight" and "age" share a long vowel, which makes the phrase ring like a bell. The hard t of "wit" returns in "chant," "weight" and "present," so the poem opens and closes on the same clipped consonant. The lines flow into each other without a full stop until the end. After the confident, self-contained first line, the rest tumbles forward in one unpunctuated sentence, as if the speaker were talking himself into the error as he went.
The poem's significance lies in this self-awareness. Many poems about ageing reflect on loss, and this one takes the more awkward step of suspecting that the reflecting is the problem. It also turns its wit on itself. The line that boasts of wit is followed by four lines that quietly undermine it, so the claim in the first line is tested by the rest. The title may call the speaker's habit a fallacy, but the poem shows that he knows about it. Admitting the mistake in five short lines is a modest form of correction. The poem can't make the present last, but it can say, in the present, where the speaker keeps going wrong.