Magic is usually about hiding the mechanism, but Dave Bonta's "Legerdemain" does the opposite: it uses the language of stage magic to point at the real mechanisms of the living world, which turn out to be stranger than any trick. The title is an old word for sleight of hand, from the French for "light of hand." The poem's second line quietly picks that up with "tricks with the light."
The speaker is never named, but the details suggest a tree, or at least a voice speaking from a plant's position. It was "dealt a singular hand," as if by chance, and has learned to make the best of it. The first trick is photosynthesis, compressed into "sun sugar." The next phrase is odder: the sugar is "bittering / at an insect's approach." The poem seems to describe a plant turning bitter against a threat, so sweetness becomes defence. The line break after "bittering" makes the change happen in front of us. Then comes the showy costume, "a conjurer's robe of air plants," which suggests epiphytes, plants that grow on a host without roots in the soil. The magician's cloak is a living thing.
The poem then drops from air to earth. "Below ground I have discovered / the prosthetic tooth of a glacier." This is the most surprising image in the poem. A glacier has been and gone, and what it left is a rounded granite stone, imagined as a false tooth, a replacement part set into the land. "Prosthetic" gives the landscape a body and a history of injury. It also makes the stone an object that doesn't quite belong, and the speaker treasures it anyway: "I hold it / like hard candy in my mind." The simile loops back to "sun sugar." Sweetness began as light and now returns as something to suck on slowly, a small private pleasure. The repeated *h* sounds of "hold," "hard," and "candy" in the line make the phrase feel like something rolled around in the mouth.
The final image is the one that matters most. The speaker's mind is "that ultimate rope trick / of rootlets / & mycorrhizal hyphae / that never quite touch." The grammar is worth slowing down for. Because the phrase follows "in my mind" directly, the mind seems to be the root-and-fungus network itself, not something separate that thinks about it. Mycorrhizal hyphae are the fine fungal threads that work alongside roots. Judging by the poem, what delights Bonta is the gap in "never quite touch." In a rope trick, a rope seems to stand unsupported, and here the exchange between plant and fungus looks like connection across a space, a bond with no visible join. The sentence stretches across five lines and ends without a full stop, so the thought trails off like a thread.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no steady metre. Lines run from a few words to a full phrase, and the breaks do real work, as with "bittering" and "I hold it." The three ampersands ("& learned," "round & granitic," "rootlets & mycorrhizal hyphae") give a handwritten, casual feel. They also work as tiny joins, small versions of the connections the poem admires. Its tenses move from the past of "was dealt," "learned," and "donned" to the present of "have discovered" and "hold." The speaker begins with a lesson learned and ends in an ongoing act of attention.
The poem is significant for how it blends two vocabularies that rarely meet. Words like "conjurer" and "rope trick" come from the theatre, while "mycorrhizal" and "granitic" come from the science lab. By setting them side by side, the poem argues that accurate knowledge doesn't drain wonder from nature and can in fact increase it. It also offers a different idea of intelligence, one that lives in partnerships and exchange and doesn't need a brain. In twelve lines it turns a forest floor into a stage and leaves you wondering what else is going on under your feet.