A couple strolls arm in arm at sunset, which sounds like the opening of a love song, and within three lines the sky has turned into a coffin lid. That swerve is the method of Dave Bonta's "Now You See It." It borrows the vocabulary of romance, stage magic and funerals, then shuffles them until we can't say which one is speaking.
The first image does a lot of work. The "sunset strip" is "red at night like a plush coffin lid." The word "plush" is what unsettles: it suggests velvet linings and theatre curtains, death made comfortable and a little showy. A second simile follows at once, "like a cartoon heart used as a glyph / to stand in for that dread word." The same red is now a coffin and a heart, and the heart is a cheap, cartoonish one, a symbol standing in for the real thing. The poem never says what the "dread word" is. Judging by the heart, it is probably "love," but the blank is deliberate. The speaker is performing the avoidance he describes.
Grammar adds to the effect. The first seven lines form one unbroken sentence with no commas, so the stroll, the similes and the strange action all spill into each other. In the middle of this the speaker says he will "bend over you in my blazer / & count to ten." The poem won't tell us what this is. It could be a referee over a fallen boxer, a child counting in hide-and-seek, or a magician's assistant lying in a box. The blazer is a smart, slightly theatrical detail, equally right for a date, a conjuror or an undertaker. The ampersand, a casual shorthand, makes the speaker sound calm and almost businesslike, which is more chilling than panic would be.
The second sentence turns to appetite: "The only hunger that matters now / can hide in a silk handkerchief / & reappear in a deck of cards." The "now" echoes the title, and the h-sounds of "hunger," "hide" and "handkerchief" link the three words, so that desire and concealment seem almost one idea. The silk is another soft fabric, a cousin of the plush lining. This is where the magic act becomes explicit. Something vanishes in one place and returns in another, but it does not return unchanged. It goes in as a handkerchief and comes out as cards.
Then comes the list: "club, diamond, spade." Its flat, counted-off rhythm recalls the earlier "count to ten." An attentive reader will notice that one suit is missing. The heart was already used up in the second simile, reduced to a glyph, and now it has vanished from the deck. The poem performs the trick its title announces. The title offers only "Now you see it" and leaves "now you don't" for us to supply. The three remaining suits can also be read, as an inference, as something like a weapon, wealth and a tool, and the last of these leads straight into the final line.
"You learn to dig" is the shortest line, and the poem shifts here to the second person. A spade is both a playing card and a shovel, so the pun turns the magic act into grave-work. The line is ambiguous. "You" might be the one in the box, learning to claw out, or the survivor, learning to bury or to search through grief. Either way the performance ends without applause, only with practical labour.
Formally the poem is free verse with no rhyme and twelve lines. The long, sprawling middle lines tighten into short, clipped ones, as if the act were being packed away. Without rhyme, the work is done by alliteration, repetition and surprising turns of image.
The poem is worth reading because it shows how people reach for ready-made symbols, like hearts, tricks and tidy lists, to avoid naming what frightens them. The poem lets the avoided thing leak through anyway. The missing heart and the unspoken word make the loss felt without being stated.