Whoever is speaking in Jim Wehlage's poem is not describing a rainy night so much as pulling someone into it. The first word is a pet name, "babey," and the whole poem is built around the repeated command "come with me." The scene is a walk in warm rain, barefoot, along a lit city street. The central idea is that rain can strip away the ordinary self and leave two people newly clean and fully awake to their senses. The poem even suggests, through its bare limbs and "form fitted air," that this closeness is partly physical and romantic.
The speaker's habit of repeating himself is the most important feature of the poem's construction. "Into" appears again and again, sometimes alone on its line, so that each repetition feels like a step off a doorstep and deeper into the weather. The words for wetness multiply in the same way: "wetted limbs," "wetted armhairs," "wetness," and finally the stuttering "wet lite / wet / asphalt." Because the poem never offers a synonym for wet, it works like the drumming of rain itself, one note struck over and over. There is no rhyme and no fixed rhythm. The poem is free verse, and it breaks into short lines, as if the speaker were whispering and pausing for breath.
The unconventional spelling adds to this sense of speech. "Babey," "nite," "lites" and "thru" look like words written down the way they sound. Capital letters are missing, punctuation is sparse, and "barefeet" and "barelimbed" are fused into single words. The effect is informal and unguarded, a voice that has no time for rules because it is too busy feeling. Some of the language is stranger still. The air is something "we swacked against the blackness / and stars." The verb is unusual, but it sounds like a slap or a whack, and the judgment seems to be that the two walkers push through the night air with energy. "Cleanst" stretches "cleanest" into something rawer and more urgent. And in "un / salted by the rain," the word is split across a line break, so that "un" hangs alone for a moment before the rain finishes the job. The salt may suggest sweat or tears, though the poem does not say, and the split makes the cleansing visible on the page.
The imagery moves outward from the body to the city. At first the focus is the skin and the air that fits around it like clothing. Then comes the poem's most surprising comparison: each of the "thousands of wetted armhairs" is "like white / street lines." A tiny detail of the body is measured against road markings, as if the walkers and the street were becoming one landscape. From there the poem looks fully outward. The street is "glistening with head lites," and the streetlights, oddly, are "alone, / moving thru the wetness." Streetlights do not move, so the effect probably comes from the walkers' own motion and from reflections sliding across the wet road. The line is also a small piece of loneliness, a contrast with the two people walking together.
The syntax falls apart as the poem nears its end, and that works in its favor. "feet time rain; walking" has no verb to hold it together. It is three nouns that fall like footsteps, and the participle "walking" arrives to name what the words have been doing. "Steel / weightless / drops" is an apparent contradiction, since steel is heavy, but it catches how raindrops in headlight look hard and metallic and yet seem to hang in the air. The last line repeats the opening invitation, so the poem ends where it began, with the speaker still asking.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it finds tenderness in an unlovely setting. Asphalt, headlights and street lines are not the usual materials of romantic nature poetry, but here the rain makes them shine. The poem does not ask the reader to escape the city. It asks us to take off our shoes and notice it.