T I M M C N U L T Y
THREE TETON POEMS
With No Song
Evening in the Tetons,
a single cloud trails north
from the summit,
and the broken walls are etched sharply
in a low angle of light
All night
the canyon will sing
the same song to itself,
and wind will curl
about the ridges and towers
with nothing to promise,
with no song it hasn't sung
for an epoch or two
and nothing new in its pocket
but a handful of sand.
In the Burrow of Night
Early fall on Owl Creek,
the stars step slowly across the valley
and frost circles the tent.
A great gray owl barks and
hoots up the pine woods,
first west of camp, then closer north
then back.
Waking in the moonless dark,
I am, for a moment, a small
pocket gopher or hare — some
long-lingering mammalian kin —
and burrow down into my bag
'against the chill,' I tell myself.
Frost
Somehow the delicate
evening sky blue petals
of roundelay bluebells survive
the thick evening frost
unscathed
and nod only slightly
to the dew drenched morning,
where even the tough
old sagebrush limbs
bow to it.
___________________
T I M M C N U L T Y
Ascendance
Pleasure Boat Studio
2013
Tim McNulty is a poet, essayist, conservation activist, and nature writer. He was born and grew up in Connecticut's Quinnipiac River Valley and attended Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts at Boston. There he met poet Denise Levertov who inspired him with her powerful fusion of visionary poetics and political activism. Tim traveled throughout the West after college and settled on the Olympic Peninsula in 1972. He lives with his wife, Mary Morgan, in the foothills of the Olympic Mountains above the Dungeness and Graywolf rivers. A passionate spokesman for the wild, Tim remains active in the Northwest environmental community.
Tim's poetry collections are: Ascendance (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2013), In Blue Mountain Dusk (Pleasure Boat Studio, 1992), and Pawtracks (Copper Canyon Press, 1978). He is the author of ten poetry chapbooks, including: Cloud Studies, Some Ducks, Through High Still Air, Reflected Light, Tundra Songs, As a Heron Unsettles a Shallow Pond, and Last Year's Poverty.
Tim's award-winning books on nature include: Olympic National Park: A Natural History (University of Washington Press), The Art of Nature (Fall River Press), Washington's Mount Rainier National Park (Mountaineers Books), Washington's Wild Rivers (Mountaineers Books), From the Air: Olympic Peninsula (Greywolf Publishers), Grand Teton: Where Lightning Walks and Grand Canyon: Window on the River of Time, among others.
