A lawyer offers Gram the easy way out, and she turns it down. She is "not any crazier than anybody," she says, and what she gives the court instead is a family fact: her son, the speaker's Daddy, was a shape-shifter, and one winter he came out a bear. She shot the bear. She would have shot it even if she had known who it was. The poem's grim comedy comes from how calmly all this is delivered, like someone explaining a family recipe to people who keep interrupting.
The poem's most important choice is its voice. There are no quotation marks. Everything reaches us through the speaker, a grandchild, in a chain of reported speech: "she said," "she told the judge and jury," "she told them." The effect is double. It sounds like testimony, flat and factual, but it also keeps Gram at one remove. We never hear her directly, only what the family has kept of her. The title, with its formal "Mrs. Wilkinson," sets the official record beside the private "Gram" of the first line. The colon and subtitle suggest, judging by the title alone, that this is one piece of a larger set of interviews, though this poem stands well on its own.
The form is free verse with no rhyme, and the rhythm is the rhythm of talk. Lines swing between the curt ("but she wouldn't let him") and the sprawling "one minute a man, next a fox or a rabbit or who-knows-what-all." That long line behaves like the thing it describes. It starts with specific animals, then dissolves into vagueness, and the vagueness is where the fear lives. Elsewhere the lines are mostly end-stopped, so each statement lands with the finality of something already settled. Phrases like "and all" and "Likely that's why" give the voice a porch-talk looseness that makes the strange logic sound reasonable.
That logic is worth following. Gram puts the blame on the other side of the family: Daddy "was from this side" but got "that trouble" from a Martin great-grandmother, and "Martins were always shifty." The word does two jobs, meaning both untrustworthy and capable of shifting. The surname also sounds like "marten," a small furred animal, which may be a quiet pun. From there she links the shifting to drink: Martins "took so easy to drink." The poem never says outright that Daddy was violent, but its details point that way. Alcohol, "that trouble," a bear that is "more dangerous even," and Gram's "She'd been suspecting" all hint at a man who became someone else, and something frightening, once the drinking started. The shape-shift can be read literally, as folklore, or as the family's way of naming what they could not say plainly. The poem lets both readings stand.
Amid this, one line is tender: "It's hard, knowing you could change." Gram is not short on sympathy for her son. Her certainty about what she did sits beside real understanding of what he was up against. The bear's timing adds to the unease, since bears are "supposed to be up in the hills asleep" in winter, and a creature out of its season suggests an order that has gone wrong.
The ending is the cruelest part, and it is delivered in the same even tone. Gram is jailed "because she said that," not for the shooting itself. A court can make room for a madwoman, which is what the lawyer was offering, but not for a sane woman who says she would shoot her own son. Her honesty costs her. The last two lines turn on the word "cooped," which belongs to hens rather than bears, and it quietly puts Gram in the position of a caged animal. Then comes the throwaway "only took her a couple years to die," where the "only" does the work of grief. Nobody makes a speech about it.
The poem is significant because it lets folklore and family damage overlap without explaining either away. It also gives dignity to a woman the law wanted to label, and it shows how much a flat, understated voice can carry.