Pamela Hobart Carter's "Magic Trick" begins with a sighting that lasts "for a blink": a black rabbit foraging in downtown Seattle. The speaker grins, because a rabbit in a city suggests Wonderland. Then, with a "poof!", the rabbit turns out to be a crow, and the poem becomes a small study in how easily the eye is fooled and how pleasant it is to be fooled. Its central idea is that wonder doesn't need a rabbit hole. It can turn up on an ordinary street, if you are willing to be tricked for a moment.
The poem is built like a magic act. The title promises a trick, and the poem delivers the vocabulary of one in order: "poof," "Presto!" and finally "hocus-pocus." Each stage has its own stanza. The first sets the scene, the second reveals the switch, and the third replays it in slow motion, like a magician explaining how it was done. The crow's tail goes up, "those rounded feathers split / to make two ears." The explanation does not break the spell. The image of feathers parting into ears is more delightful than the original illusion, because the speaker now knows exactly why the rabbit appeared.
Carter writes in free verse with no rhyme scheme, and the stanzas vary in length, from four lines to seven to two. Still, the sound is carefully managed. "Black rabbit" and "blink" crackle with hard consonants, and "forages" and "downtown" sit close together in the opening lines. The one real echo comes late, when the crow is "distinctly corvine" and her ears are "soft, dark, lupine." The matching *-ine* endings link the two transformations. There is a small twist, too: "lupine" means wolflike, while the word for rabbit-like would be "leporine." Whether deliberate or not, the slip suits a poem about things not being quite what they seem, as if the language were playing the trick along with the crow.
The setting does a lot of work. Wonderland is set against "planting strip," "REI" and "Valley Ridge Playfield parking lot," which are practical, commercial, slightly dull places. The humour comes from this contrast. The poem doesn't escape the city to find magic. It finds it two blocks from an outdoor-gear store.
The crow is also the most fully drawn character. She is a "regal silhouette" with a "critical eye," and she smooths her plumage as though she knows the audience has been taken in. The speaker's flat "I am not Alice" admits that she won't tumble after the rabbit into another world. The crow seems to judge the human watcher and find her a little ordinary. That makes the title ambiguous: the trick belongs to the crow as much as to the speaker's imagination.
The ending shifts the poem. The next night, the speaker sees a real rabbit, a "feral bunny" with a "bouncy, silent passage." This is the thing she wished for, but she "did not follow." A stanza break falls in the middle of that sentence, after "parking lot," so the poem seems to hesitate where she does. The real rabbit is less magical than the crow, and the darkness leaves the speaker no illusions. Her last line, "I admit it is that crow who called hocus-pocus," is a concession, and it also contains a pun. Crows *call*, so the bird becomes both the caller of the magic words and the one who literally caws them.
The poem is significant for what it says about attention. The speaker's pleasure comes from looking closely, from noticing the half-second when a bird's tail feathers could pass for ears. The poem is light and funny, but it suggests that a good magician needs a willing audience. Being briefly fooled is a way of seeing the world freshly, and a crow in a city street can do it as well as any white rabbit.