In Tir na nÓg

In Tír na nÓg

by Linda Aldrich

oil painting by Jack B. Yeats, 1936

I’d like to think poetry is doing it, the far-off gaze

taking him out of the world or further into it,

looking at nothing and everything at once,

how when absorbed, time expands the moment,

puts him where he is and not there at all,

as he disappears into the clean photosynthesis

of a sunny day – the ocean, the boats, the people

on shore, the grass growing over and around him.

I know this can happen, how something catches us

up into the light of all that transpires, the moist green

of summer, the ocean’s glint, the words before words,

that first buzz fit of love in the heart. He does seem

happy, our young man, in this lush magma of paint,

and does he hold a book of color sketches, and so rises

from his own palette, from the center of his own dancing

landscape, a reddish smile, the dark flash of his eyes?

We see how young he is and are reminded of ourselves

when we knew how to begin, how to find our way back

into the beauty of making. The music, too, we remember,

though we must be still as moss to hear it.