Isn’t it great when you see someone doing something you love so much better than you do it? It’s inspiring and crackly and delicious. Michael Chitwood does it with his poem in this month’s Sun magazine (a gem if you’ve never heard of it).

Instructions for Afterward
Michael Chitwood

Shine and sleep and hum
And drum your mute fingers on the table.

Say of someone dead
A particular tree they were fond of.

Say of an empire
Its contributions to the art of baking.

Secretly sing words
That are not the words to the song.

Wrong the weather
And throw rocks at a sign of the times.

When you leave the body
Don’t be afraid to notice how the tongue lolls

From the slack mouth.
We are more than half slouch

And droop and sag.
Love our unbecoming.

Former alcoholics — they’re always warning you off. In her book
about drinking, the late Caroline Knapp wrote, “Liquor creates
delusion…. A single drink can make you feel unstoppable,
masterful, capable of solving problems that overwhelmed you
just five minutes before. In fact, the opposite is true: drinking
brings your life to a standstill, makes it static as rock over time.”
Knapp quit drinking because she changed her mind about one
thing in particular. She had spent her adult life, she wrote,
believing that she drank because she was unhappy. And then
she thought, “Maybe, just maybe, I’m unhappy because I drink.”

William Leith, from “The Hungry Years”