Mark Madigan: “The Writing Shed”
THE WRITING SHED
Laugharne, Wales
I remember it darker, a weather-beaten blue,
that windswept day I first came to visit
and how cold rain kept slapping the door
I shivered beside, my well-worn umbrella
soon just a shamble of thin metal rods
jutting through black cloth.
Through the window I spied
a scattering of notebooks, pencils and pens
lying on a shelf, a makeshift desk
where Dylan once sat scribbling lines
or looked up to watch
estuary water wash out to sea.
Visiting, again, now thirty years on,
my memory is either showing its cracks
or somebody’s been here fixing things up.
Photos and prints are tacked onto walls
and a rush-bottom chair is nestled against
a kitchen-sized table serving as a desk
where books are stacked neatly, three to a pile.
Off to the left, a bookcase spills out
books to consult while manuscript pages
lie crumpled on the floor.
In the center of it all, one intimate touch:
a grown man’s jacket hangs on a chair.
As if any minute Dylan might walk in
to finish some poem
which only yesterday came to him.
Mark Madigan is the author of Thump and other poems, a chapbook published by Finishing Line Press. His work has previously appeared in Louisville Review, Tar River Poetry, Third Wednesday, and Valparaiso Poetry Review.