At 3 a.m. nobody is watching, so the speaker of Diane di Prima's poem can be as odd as she likes. She eats chicken gizzards, reads Raymond Chandler and opens with a self-diagnosis: "maybe i am crazy." Gizzards are cheap, unglamorous food, and Chandler is a writer of night-time, lonely detective stories. Together they set up a mood of private, slightly shabby insomnia. The poem reads like a list of chores, but what it is really about is whatever those chores are keeping at bay.
The title, "Take: 3/15/61," reads like a note from a recording session or a film shoot. That suggests one pass, no polishing, a moment caught as it happened. The poem's look supports this. It uses lowercase "i," "&" and "w/," and "thru" for "through." It has a comma where a full stop might go and a missing space in "3 a m,eating." "Probable nobody else" drops the "-ly" the way people do in speech. Nothing rhymes, and the rhythm follows a voice that wanders, doubles back and trails off. The date also matters because the poem is about sorting through old, dated paper. Stamped and postmarked mail has been sitting in a pile for ten years, and the poem is stamped with its own day.
The middle stanza is the funniest and the strangest. Going through the mail, the speaker cuts off stamps for "anna's kid's collection," an act of small kindness. She also makes a discovery: Joan O'Malley "for ten years never used stamps / w/ pictures, but only those purple threes." The parenthesis "(it was threes then)" is a nice touch, because it shows how quickly an ordinary price becomes a relic. Then comes "which goes to show you." Show you what? The sentence promises a moral and never delivers one. The speaker has found a pattern in someone else's habits and cannot say what it means. Perhaps there is nothing to say, or perhaps the meaning is too close to home. It is the poem's quietest joke, and the gap where the lesson should be is where the feeling sits.
The final stanza is where the poem's method shows. "i have carefully avoided mention of any harpies / that might still be on the firescape." The sentence says it is avoiding the harpies while mentioning them, like someone who says "I'm not going to talk about it" and then talks about it. Harpies are winged, screeching creatures from Greek myth. Landing them on a fire escape puts something monstrous on a plain city ledge, and the judgment is mine, but they read to me as anxieties, accusations or old griefs that have come back and are tapping at the window. "Firescape" also blends "fire escape" with "escape," a slip that fits a poem so concerned with getting away from something. The speaker's defence is tidiness. She "meticulously" throws out "old dried out rubber bands," things that have lost their stretch and can no longer hold anything together. The image is small, but it sits close to the poem's mood of things gone brittle.
Only in the last three lines does a second person appear. She will pull out the bed and put on a fitted sheet, "not that you'll notice, one way or the other." After all the talk of stamps and rubber bands we learn that the housework may be for someone, and that this someone is indifferent or absent. The line is flat, almost shrugging, and it hurts for that reason. The speaker does not complain. She lets the offhand tone carry the loneliness, and the bed, made up for no one's notice, becomes the poem's most exposed image.
The poem matters because it trusts small, specific, slightly ridiculous details to carry real feeling. It names no heartbreak and makes no speech about solitude. It gives us gizzards, purple threes, dried rubber bands and a fitted sheet, and lets us feel what they surround. The humour and the ache arrive together, and the poem never explains either.