Summer arrives in a lakeside city, and the speaker watches it change. After three seasons of ice and wind, the sun, pictured as a ruthless god, burns the pavement and pale skin, and the whole place seems to steam. The heat brings people outdoors and sharpens the body: girls strip down, and the male gaze is caught up in hormones and pounding blood.
The poem also sets the old against the new. Rusting industrial buildings stand like relics beside the highways, while steel towers reach into the sky and speak a "language of the future" that gets no reply. The speaker seems to feel some wistfulness about this emptiness.
The ending turns warmer. The old neighborhoods, with their hot talk and sweaty nights, live and breathe like one creature that sleeps, dreams and is reborn each morning. The mood is sultry, restless and sensual, but it finishes on a note of renewal, as if human closeness outlasts the cold steel of the future.