Anyone who knows the phrase "under the influence" will catch the trick in Dave Bonta's title. To be "over the influence" sounds like good news: the drinking is behind you, the spell is broken. But the six lines that follow refuse to celebrate. They are a list of things missed, and the central idea is an uncomfortable one. Even a habit we have outgrown, or had to outgrow, may have given us something we can't easily replace.
The poem opens with two words, "I miss," and the line break leaves them alone for a moment. It reads like an admission, said before the speaker can talk himself out of it. What he misses comes in a run of unpunctuated phrases: "the wine I used to live for / the fire in my head / the mist." The phrase "live for" is the most telling. It makes wine more than a pleasure; it was once a purpose. The past tense, "used to," quietly says that is over. The title makes me read this as sobriety, though that is an inference from the wordplay and not something the poem states.
The three items are physically very different. Wine is liquid, fire is heat and light, and mist is vapor that hangs and blurs. Read in order, they move from something poured, to something burning, to something that hardly exists, as if the experience were dissolving while the speaker describes it. "Fire in my head" can mean the flush of drink, but it also sounds like inspiration or intensity of thought. "Mist" is the cost and the charm at once, since it softens the world and hides it too. The sound of the word matters as well. "Miss" and "mist" differ by a single letter and bookend the first stanza, so the thing he longs for is almost an echo of the longing itself.
Then the poem turns, and the turn is easy to overlook. After a blank space comes "and the way the high elms / sang in the dark." The stanza breaks, the focus moves outward, and the "I" disappears from the grammar. Until now the missed things were all inside the speaker: his thirst, his head. Now the object of longing is a tree, or a row of them, singing. The elms are clearly a bit of personification, but they may also be plain description of wind in leaves at night. The poem leaves open whether the trees sang only because the speaker was intoxicated, or whether sobriety has simply made him deaf to them. I find the second reading sadder and more interesting. The wine may have been a way of listening, and its loss may have narrowed the world.
The word "high" is hard to ignore here. It describes the trees' height, but in a poem about drinking it also carries its slangy sense of intoxication, so the elms seem to share in the altered state. "Dark" is the poem's last word, and it makes a quiet counterweight to "mist." Both are conditions of reduced sight, and both are things the speaker misses. What he prizes is what he could see least clearly, which is a small paradox the poem never explains.
Formally, the poem is free verse, with no end rhyme and no fixed meter. The lines are short, from two syllables to about seven, and the rhythm drops into a gentle lilt on "the fire in my head," then clips short at "the mist." The sounds do the work that rhyme might have done. The long *i* of "wine," "fire," and "high" links the poem's chief images, and the soft *s* in "miss," "mist," and "sang" gives it a hushed, breathy quality. There is no full stop at the end. The poem simply stops on "dark," which suits a feeling that hasn't been resolved.
What makes it significant is how honestly it handles ambivalence. Poems about giving something up often settle into relief or moral clarity. This one allows the loss to be beautiful, and in six short lines it won't pretend otherwise. It leaves the reader with a harder and more truthful idea: that knowing something was bad for you doesn't stop you from missing the music it made.