June's hide taken off distant hedges--Karyna McGlynn

Everything about this poem confuses me. But there is an urgency in the words and rhythm to the lines, that gives me the impression the poet might feel the same way. Beginning with the first two words, "and thus," along with the title, I am aware that I am about to read an account or commentary on a happening: "June's hide taken..." What I really get though is something like a list of short, sometimes choppy, and very active yet obscure lines. McGlynn also does not use punctuation which normally allows me the freedom to read the lines how I chose; however each line is double spaced. Thus the lines stand alone and I want to pause my reading at each line break; though doing that divorces each line from the other so much that they become difficult to associate. Also when I say active I mean that nearly all of the fifteen lines has a verb in them, for example: "june but had an animal embalmed," or "wrist limp can't blow it back plum." These are some of the things that McGlynn is doing I believe to create a tension in the poem, not only from one line to another, but also between the reader and the speaker.

As a listener or reader of a poem I believe to be an account I will have an expectation of the speaker to tell me something. McGlynn however doesn't overtly tell me anything. This makes me angry. But I delight in the rhythm of the lines so much, "down into dusk dulls me in this," that I do not become disengaged from the poem. I try to dive further into it but become further lost. McGlynn uses six different pronouns (she, her, someone, me, your, I) and one proper noun (june). In prose this might not be a problem, but in such short and independent lines whatever story the speaker is trying to tell seems to get lost, or rather floats from one pronoun to another without really feeling intimate, without really relating anything. I never really know what she is talking about.

When I get to the final lines of the poem none of this mystery is worked out for me, but I finally read something that is direct, "ok / I couldn't say a damn thing about it." The speaker is telling me in plain language that she is trying to tell her own perspective of this ocurrance but that she can't. And by saying "ok" it is as if she is asking me to understand that the way she is telling the story is the only way she can tell it. McGlynn has been setting me up for this all along, but she is successful because I am unaware of it. Once I understand that the speaker herself may be as confused as I am I can reenter the poem without the feeling that I am missing something. When I do this I am allowed to float along with the story from one line to the next and simply enjoy the ride because I have understood that sometimes the story is not what is important. What is important is simply trying to tell it.