On a hot day at the shore, the poem sets three generations side by side and lets the heat flatten them. It begins with old men on a boardwalk who "take off their hats / & dream of the city, once theirs." It ends with the same men asleep, "dreamless." Between those two points comes the crowded, sweaty life of the beach, including a heavy woman, a bored child and a boy staring at a girl. The central idea is not stated outright. Heat is a kind of anesthetic that dissolves even the little that people have left to hold onto, such as desire, memory and the wish for relief.
The poem is in free verse, with no rhyme and no regular meter, and its short, uneven lines read like glances around a beach. Most of it is one long sentence, running from "On the boardwalk" to "mined by the sun." The lines keep breaking in the middle of a thought ("The wind pushes / into the sweat"), which makes the wind feel like it is shoving its way through the scene. The ampersands in "hotdogs & warm beer" and "the old men take off their hats / &" speed things up and give the catalogue a casual, jotted-down look, as though the speaker were noting what drifts past. The catalogue itself is not pretty: sweat, hotdogs, warm beer. The heat is felt through the nose and skin as much as the eye.
The imagery is blunt and sometimes uncomfortable. The woman "a yard wide at the hips" is a comic exaggeration, and it is hard to tell whether the speaker is mocking her or just seeing her as the sweating, swollen heat made flesh. The "pale spider" is more puzzling. Judging by the imagery, it is some small scuttling thing on the sand, perhaps a toy, that "makes false rushes / at a string trailed / from the fingers of a kid." The phrase "false rushes" captures the whole mood in a few syllables, since it describes movement that goes nowhere. The kid is not even paying attention. He is "watching a girl's thighs / open as softly / as a clam mined by the sun."
That last simile is the poem's most vivid image, and a strange one. The comparison is sensual, and the adverb "softly" gives it a hush. But "mined" makes the sun a worker prying something loose, so the opening feels forced out of the girl by the weather rather than chosen. A boy's first stirrings of desire are at once natural and slightly predatory, and the verb leaves that tension unresolved. Sound helps here. The soft "s" and "l" sounds of "softly" and "clam" slow the line down, just before the poem turns hard.
That turn comes with "Squalls crack light below the horizon / but the heat holds." The verb "crack" brings a sudden brightness and noise, a promise of a storm, and the second half of the sentence denies it. The storm happens far away, "below the horizon," and the beach gets none of the relief. The short, flat "the heat holds" sounds like a door closing.
The old men frame the poem, and the closing shift is the cruelest part. At first they are still dreaming of the city and "calling the sea in," a gesture that can be read as longing for something large and restoring. By the end they are "forgetting / the city that broke them out of it / long ago." The phrase "broke them out of it" is ambiguous. It might mean the city expelled them, or ruined them, or both. Either way, the loss is old, and the heat now erases even the memory of it. The last line, "sleep by the sea, / dreamless," ends on one word set apart on its own line. It is not a peaceful sleep. It is the absence of the one thing, dreaming, that had kept them company.
The poem is worth reading because it refuses to comfort. It does not tell us that youth is beautiful or age is wise, and it does not explain what the city meant. It sets a young body, a heavy body and old bodies in the same heat and lets them fall quiet. The title's pun on "wave" adds to this, since the sea is being called in while the heat comes in as a wave of its own and wins. In very few lines, the poem makes a summer afternoon feel like a slow, humid erasing of the people on it.