A sleepless speaker fills the small hours with odd, ordinary tasks: eating chicken gizzards, reading Raymond Chandler, sorting through ten years of old mail. The poem opens with a half-joking worry that she might be crazy, since nobody else would be awake. Then it wanders, the way a tired mind does. She cuts stamps off envelopes for a friend's child, and stumbles on a small discovery about someone who only ever used plain purple three-cent stamps. "Which goes to show you," she says, though it's not clear what it shows.
The mood is restless, wry, and a little lonely. The cleaning feels like a way of keeping busy, and she carefully avoids mentioning the "harpies" that might still be on the fire escape, which hints at fears she would rather not face. The last line, "not that you'll notice, one way or the other," is where the loneliness shows. She is making the bed fresh for someone who may not care, or may not be there to see it.