It’s three in the morning again,
and, favorite illusion, my insomnia
is unlike anyone else’s, meets up with
the one true allegorical bird out there.
Plain bird whose one song is all songs.
Who accompanied me once
while I waited and waited and no call came
and who, for god’s sake, will not stop singing now.
Since the sky won’t be lightening for hours,
I could rise and open the curtains fast
to startle it, and further complicate
my gratitude.
Lia Purpura is the author of nine collections of essays, poems, and translations. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for On Looking (essays, Sarabande Books), her awards include Guggenheim, NEA, and Fulbright Fellowships, as well as five Pushcart Prizes, the Associated Writing Programs Award in Nonfiction, and others. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Orion, The Paris Review, The Georgia Review, Agni, Emergence, and elsewhere. She lives in Baltimore, MD, where she is Writer in Residence at The University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She has taught in the Rainier Writing Workshop’s MFA program, at Breadloaf Writers Conference, The University of Iowa’s Nonfiction MFA program and at conferences, workshops, and graduate programs throughout the country. Her newest collection of poems is It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful (Penguin) and her latest collection of essays is All the Fierce Tethers (Sarabande Books).
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