Men Bathing, After Edvard Munch

An early poem from Grub, 1993, but probably written a few years before then.

Their wet heads are jaggy as pine cones

opening to sunlight on the sill

of the brightest room of the house;

the surf’s coarse marbling

is the work of an apprentice painter

learning to woodgrain doors,

a trial piece in trompe l’oeil

that deceives no-one.

Shin-deep,

they are wading out of the sun

as if out of a factory,

each neat, chilled penis cradled

in a nest of wet pubes

like the shell in the Birth of Venus.