Orrin Schwab's «In the Heat» opens with a small shock: the city sweats. From there the poem keeps pushing the comparison until summer stops being weather and becomes a condition of the body. Trucks, river fumes, trains and evening talk all belong to one large, overheated creature. The central idea arrives with the turn in the last stanza, "but the city was alive." The grime, smell and discomfort are not a backdrop to city life. They are the evidence of it.
The first four stanzas build that body out of hard materials. "Black drops poured / over cement" is the poem's first image of sweat, and judging by the imagery it blends perspiration with tar and soot. Then the metaphor spreads. The bridges "creaked / under the thunder of trucks," so traffic becomes a storm, and "basalt and steel / was stained with carbon," so the city's skin is discoloured by its own exhaust. Even sound gets weight. The "dull sounds" don't just exist, they "hung over the streets," as heavy as humid air, and the sun has to "break through" them as if through a ceiling.
The verbs show who is gentle and who is rough. The air "swept" through the cars and "stroked" the benches and trees, the only tender touch in the poem, and it is brief. Two stanzas later the trains "worked / with fists and heels," a phrase that is hard to pin down. It could describe the pounding of wheels, or the labour of the people who ride and run them. Either way the physical effort is relentless, and the "thin wet air" that follows is a small contradiction that anyone who has stood in humid weather will recognise. Air that is thin yet wet gives no relief.
The poem's form copies this slackness. There is no rhyme and no steady metre, and the poem has no capital letters or full stops. Short lines often end on connecting words ("over cement and," "from the river and"), so the reader is tipped forward into the next line without a rest, the way a day in the heat runs on without a break. The fifth stanza, twelve lines against the earlier four and six, sprawls the most. It piles up phrase after phrase and seems to leak over its own edges.
That stanza also changes what the sweat is. "Perspiration and odors" float "through conversations," and speech becomes physical: "sultry, seasoned words / a saline discourse." Talk here is salty and has been cooked by the heat. The repeated sibilants ("sultry, seasoned," "saline," "syllables") hiss through the lines like breath or friction. The repeated "floated" and "floating" suggest that words and smells drift in the same thick air. By this point the city's sweat and the city's speech are almost the same substance.
The ending is quietly uneasy. The night is "timorous," timid, and the syllables are "irked" by it. We might expect night to bring relief, but it behaves like the heat itself. It "sank into the sidewalks" and "moved slowly, furtively," like something sneaking through the streets rather than cooling them. The last words, "in the heat," echo the opening "in the summer," so the poem closes on the same condition it began with. Nothing has been resolved.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it neither flatters the city nor condemns it. It lists stains, fumes and smoky clothes without any hint of disgust, and then calls the whole mess "alive." The word "squirming" is not elegant, but it is exact, because it describes something that cannot get comfortable and cannot stop moving. By turning sweat into speech, Schwab suggests that a city's character comes from just this, people and machines crowded together and exuding themselves into the air.