Trick

Interpreting poems is not a matter of having a set of pre-existing tools that you can choose among to find the right one. Instead, the poems themselves offer you tools for their interpretation, or, in a sense, you have to fashion your own interpretive tools from the raw materials that the poem itself offers you. But how can you fashion such a tool?

The "trick" is to find something in the poem that can be used to interpret other parts of the poem, as in the opening lines of Sam Willetts's "Trick":

The unexceptional mystery takes place:
around eleven, love turns to matter, Dad

dead.

The mystery of a moment of transformation (love to matter, Dad to dead) can then be a tool to interpret the poem further; here, as "Spring" is seen "breaking promises," or in the "opacity" of the alchemy with which the poem ends:

.... Dad

dead; ends of the opaque trick
that turns our gold to lead

"Dad" to "dead": an additional letter changes a vowel sound, and everything is changed. Poetry can act out this transformation, these "unexpected mysteries," but it cannot do anything about them, even when its own "opaque tricks" are made less mysterious by being made into tools.

Here's the whole poem, from Poetry Daily:

TRICK

The unexceptional mystery takes place:
around eleven, love turns to matter, Dad

dead. The ward grows and shrinks, early Spring
breaking promises through the glass.

Dad’s untoothed mouth gawps, and its last
O holds one darkness; dark of a worked-out

abandoned mine. His absence is brute
absurdity, his hand soft as vellum.

His new state exposes the stark child of him,
and un-sons me. No answers now to a son’s

questions, about this, about the sense,
for all his slightness, of a long life’s mass

coming to rest, a settling that churns up
grief in a rounding cloud. Dad

dead; ends of the opaque trick
that turns our gold to lead

Sam Willetts
Granta, Summer 2009