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Wickedness appears attractive enough to mirror the speaker back to himself, while even the deep hurt of `imaginatim` is said to be lost in the present time.

The page treats evil less as doctrine than as spectacle and reflection. The cleaned transcript makes `Slight of Hand` fit its logic of misdirection and self-recognition.

'Slight of Hand' makes wickedness a magician's trick of perception: 'I never saw wicked so good: / I have never seen myself!' The self vanishes in the same act that makes evil look attractive, and 'the way I watch wicked go back' suggests both watching it recede and watching it run in reverse. Even 'the deep hurt of imaginatim' is 'lost here', dissolved into the flat finality of 'Our present time'. The poem treats sin as misdirection - something seen, not done - that erases the watcher along with the wound.