Tim McNulty's Sourdough Mountain Poems

One of Ish River Country's finest poets, Tim McNulty, who lives on the Olympic Peninsula near the town of Sequim, recently published a new book of verse entitled "Through High Still Air." The chapbook collects his poetry that was composed on top of Sourdough Peak in the North Cascades--he spent last summer working up there in a fire lookout, coincidentally 50 years after Gary Snyder's famous poetry-writing stint at the same lookout.

McNulty recently shared a few of his new poems at a reading at the Lucia Douglas Gallery in Bellingham as part of their excellent "Poetry as Art" series--he read to a standing room-only crowd, surrounded by an exhibition of paintings of trees by different artists. Here's one of my favorites, which was distributed as a limited-edition broadside:



"Night, Sourdough Mountain Lookout"

A late-summer sun
threads the needles of McMillan Spires
and disappears in a reef of coral cloud.

Winds roll the mountain trees,
batter the shutter props.

I light a candle with the coming dark.
Its reflection in the window glass
flickers over mountains and shadowed valleys
seventeen miles north to Canada.

Not another light.

The lookout is a dim star
anchored to a rib of the planet
like a skiff to a shoal
in a wheeling sea of stars.

Night sky at full flood.

Wildly awake.

--Tim McNulty

(When he read the "lookout is a dim star" section, I got goosebumps. Maybe you had to be there, or maybe you just need to have some experience with the highcountry of the North Cascades...)

You can purchase his book at Amazon or directly from his publisher, Pleasure Boat Studio.

More information on the cultural history of fire lookouts in the North Cascades here.
north cascades