Jim Wehlage's untitled poem begins with a stumble. "its like music" is a plain simile, but the next line twists it into something stranger: "its i like music." It could be a slip the poet chose to keep, or a collision of "it" and "I," as if the speaker can't decide whether music is something out in the world or a state he is in. That uncertainty drives the poem. Music here is hardly sound at all. It is "the answer," though we never learn the question, and everything that follows tries to show what that answer feels like.
The method is accumulation. Images pile up, joined by commas and loose apposition, so the poem reads like one long breath. A dandelion bounces in April. A rainbow gives way to "fantastic / lite beams, smiles, clear ribbons of rain." The sun becomes a "bridge," and then, startlingly, "the long / womans belly, the horizon," the curve of the world's edge turned into a body. The line break after "long" holds back the noun for a moment, so the reader hangs between two pictures. Words of light keep returning ("brilliant," "bright," "lite," "sun splashed"), as though the poem wants to glow as well as describe.
Halfway through, the imagery sinks from sky to wood. Sap "bubbling up like a stream" through a tree becomes the central image, and the word *bubble* keeps surfacing: "bubble surfaces," "sap bubbles," "bubbling clearness," "the bubbling goes out." Beside it sits *clear* in several forms: "clear ribbons," "clearness," "feeling clearly." Effervescence and transparency are the two qualities the poem wants us to feel. Then comes its boldest claim, that "the conscious of the tree," of the earth, and "of you" all merge. The grammar is loose ("conscious" where we expect "consciousness"), but the looseness keeps the line moving instead of stopping to explain.
There is no rhyme and no steady metre. The rhythm comes from the length of phrases, with clipped bursts like "the contact, the hit," set against long unspooling runs. Sound does some of the work too. Listen to the b's in "bridge," "belly," "bubbling," "branches," "bright," "bird," "body," "breathing." The lips pop just as bubbles do. The dropped apostrophes in "its" and "womans," and spellings like "lite" and "thru," suggest, judging by the page, a poem written for speed and ease rather than polish.
The middle section turns bodily. When music is here, the earth shakes, then "opens up / receives / because its time has come." The one-word line "receives" gives the ground a kind of consent. Together with the belly, the opening and "the contact, the hit," it hints at fertility, perhaps even sexual release, though the poem never says so. A bird leaves its nest, the first wind touches warm skin, and joy comes "up like suction / like breathing out brings the breath back in." That line does what it describes: it exhales, then draws back. Joy is shown as a cycle, a give and return, which fits the closing note of "elation, / moving further on."
The ending pulls the camera back sharply. "All this emanates from the head of a man / who walks up the street, it is / his odor, his essence." After sky, sap and ocean we land on a pavement. "Emanates" sounds almost sacred, while "odor" is blunt and physical, and the clash is the point. The poem never says whether the man is the speaker (recall the odd "its i") or someone he watches. Either way, it places the wonder in an ordinary human presence, with no concert hall or mountain needed.
The poem is not flawless. "Fantastic" is a loose, tired word, and some images blur together. Still, it is worth reading for how it tries to enact a feeling rather than explain it, using repetition, enjambment and sound to make a reader sense something rising. Its last move is its best one: the music has been walking up the street all along.