"Four O'Clock, Summer Street" is may favorite McGuckian poem. According to her images and diction, I feel the narrator embodying her imaginative power.
This imaginative power is the unconscious; it gives a room, and/or a woman's self, "a kind of flying-heartedness." The term "flying-heartedness" expresses the passion, energy, and mystery that forms the essence of a woman.
The narrator's essence, made analogous to a perfume, is absorbed by only a "tiny slice of the house." She would like this scent to permeate her entire being, just as it permeates the body of the "red-brown girl."
The "red-brown girl" is a muse of sorts--she is a physical manifestation of the narrator's unconscious. The muse embodies the color blue, a color which continually symbolizes the unconscious realm, or the "imaginative space," for McGuckian. The muse drank blue and "it had dried in her." Thus this girl will have permanent access to the unconscious; "she carried it wide awake in herself / ever after."
If the unconscious is "wide awake" in the "red-brown girl" then she must be the narrator's muse--inspiring the poet to bring the unconscious to light.
Both the muse and the narrator represent a threshold between boundaries--an in-between space. The narrator herself is somewhere between childhood and womanhood. She tries to capture an innocent passion and energy, "A flying-heartedness," while still maturing and probing deeper into the unconscious realm. (The term "girl" and the opening phrase, "As a child cries," are references back to childhood).
The muse also represents a threshold in the sense that she exists at the point where boundaries cross one another, or where they are one and the same. The red-brown girl has a "boy-girl body of a flower" meaning that she has parts "belonging" to each gender, just as a flower contains within it both the male and female sexual organs/parts. (This image calls to mind Virginia Woolf's androgynous figure). The "red-brown girl" is robust and full of life, but also delicate for she is named as a "girl" so she must be young.
The muse carries the music of the unconscious within her, and it "blew that other look / to bits." McGuckian searches for a way to break through to the realm of the unconscious and to see the world in a new light. She begs, "If what she hunted for could fit my eys, / I would shine in the window of her blood like wine, or perfume, or till nothing was left of me bust listening." The narrator and/or the poet wishes to embrace and embody this muse. McGuckian uses terms such as "wine," "perfume," and "listening" to reveal this desire to intoxicate, permeate, and absorb the imaginative power that the "red-brown" girls represents. McGuckian would like to get drunk off of the blue, and intoxicate herself with creativity, mystery, and female essence.