Heat Wave

On the boardwalk old men take off their hats & dream of the city, once theirs, calling the sea in. The wind pushes into the sweat of a woman a yard wide at the hips, into the smells of hotdogs & warm beer & across sand a pale spider makes false rushes at a string trailed from the fingers of a kid who is watching a girl's thighs open as softly as a clam mined by the sun. Squalls crack light below the horizon but the heat holds. The old men, forgetting the city that broke them out of it long ago, sleep by the sea, dreamless.