The title promises a magic trick, and the poem delivers two of them. Neither involves a magician. In the first, a chickadee seems to gather thistle down and a second look turns it into the speaker's own hair. In the second, a butterfly lands and simply stops being there. Between them, a small garden scene becomes a quiet meditation on attention, ageing and how little control we have over what we see.
The first stanza is plain observation. A chickadee "fills its beak with thistle down / and flies off to its nest." Thistle down is a good choice of detail. It is the light, white fluff that carries seeds on the wind, so it suggests beginnings, and a nest lined with it suggests comfort and new life. Then comes the pivot, marked by a colon: "I take a closer look: / that's no down, but my own white hair / from last month's haircut." The correction is almost comic. The speaker has been fooled, and the bird has quietly raided his leftovers. The humour has a gentler side, though. Hair that was cut and thrown away turns out to be useful, and the phrase "my own white hair" admits, without fuss, that the speaker is getting older. Whiteness links the hair to the down, but the two stand at opposite ends of a life cycle: seed fluff for what is just starting, white hair for what is winding down. The bird does not care about the difference. Both are soft, both will do for a nest. A body's cast-offs are being recycled into a new generation, and the speaker is oddly, pleasingly part of the process.
The word "down" does extra work here. It means feathery fluff, but it also carries a hint of lowering and softening, of things settling toward the ground. The poem never says so, but the pun sits quietly underneath the scene.
The third stanza reverses the trick. Where the second stanza turned one thing into another, the third makes something vanish. "A spring azure butterfly / lands on the blue gravel road / and disappears." The repeated blue is the key. The butterfly's name is a colour, the road is the same colour, and so the insect melts into its surroundings. Judging by the imagery, the disappearance is camouflage rather than flight, which makes it the most literal sleight-of-hand in the poem. This time a closer look would not help. The speaker has just learned that looking closely can correct an error, and now he meets something that simply slips out of sight.
The form supports all this. There are three tercets, no rhyme and no fixed metre, so the poem sounds like someone quietly talking. Its brevity and its attention to a season and a small creature recall haiku, though it does not follow the 5-7-5 pattern. The most interesting rhythm is in the closing lines. By my count they shrink from six syllables ("and flies off to its nest") to five ("from last month's haircut") to four ("and disappears"). Each stanza ends a little sooner than the one before, and the last one ends almost before we are ready, just as the butterfly does. The diction is mostly short, everyday words, so the two Latinate flourishes, "azure" and "disappears," stand out. "Azure" gives the butterfly a flash of brightness, and "disappears" takes it away.
The poem is significant because it is modest and still has real depth. It does not lecture us about nature or ageing. It shows a person misreading a scene, correcting himself, and then being outwitted anyway. Humans usually put themselves at the centre of a landscape, and here the speaker is a supplier of nesting material and an audience for tricks he did not plan. The poem suggests that paying attention is worthwhile, because the closer look yields a surprise about oneself. It also suggests that attention has limits, because some things are gone the moment we think we have them.