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LIFE IS AN ANCIENT THING

        (Thinking of Tim Rundquist)


How odd
Now that I am inescapably
       Into my eighties
That I should remember how
Three-score and ten years ago

Stopping with other kids
       After school
To jump into South Creek
Where it passed under the road
To swim
       Or perhaps only to talk

Full of large ideas

How we stirred
Biblical fragments together
With arithmetic, calculating
When it would be that we
       Should it be
Reached three-score and ten
Or if by reason of strength
Four score

It would be 2001
A time impossibly far
From what none of us yet
Called The Great War

Since December 7, 1941
Arriving home from Sunday School
Up the hill from the same creek
I had thought, hearing of Pearl Harbor
That I should die in a war
As young men do

       Instead
Now that I am inescapably
Into my eighties
I wonder why I should have to see
Young men die

And like those boys
At the bridge in Summer
      Full of large ideas
I have come to believe 
That I have been looking too long
In the wrong place for life
       And death

Life is an ancient thing 

Life is one of the things
That earth is, and does
       Here and there

With windows

And it is the windows
That are three-score and ten
       Now and then
Before they grow dark again

I do not know when life began
Impossibly long ago, I think
And perhaps even farther away

It is an ancient thing
That we are a part of
For as long as we are

I am Gus and Jennie
Come together
Fragments of what they were
A new window on the world
       Of life

And you are such as I
Part of an ancient thing

We are star-stuff
Ordinary stuff of the universe
Crammed into a star
And blown out in new form

And collected again
into earth, and probably earths
       Everywhere

Where we have come to life
       And conscious life
Able to know what we are
And how lovely it is to be alive
       Even knowing

That our own part of being alive
Will not last much more than
Three-score and ten
Or perhaps by reason of good luck
Four score

And then the light in our window
Will go out, though
The whole house will surely shine
Because, as we know
It is a very good thing to be alive

And life is an ancient thing
       This thing we love
That is tenacious 
And terrible in its desire
To find a way to go on

It is an ancient thing
We are a part of

       Star-stuff

When we moved to Minneapolis
I began to walk around Lake Nokomis
       Almost three miles
       Almost three years
And calculated
As I had done at South Creek
       Higher math
       In the service of
       Lake-level ideas
That I had walked
Three thousand miles

And finding a carp
Up on the walk
       One day
Began to wonder
How it had gotten to the Lake
       At all

Twelve hundred miles to the Gulf

But at three miles a day
I had walked coast-to-coast
In a thousand days
       So to speak

I gave the carp a million years
To go six million feet
       Six feet a year
       Up the River or the Sea
In generations such as our own

At three miles an hour
Three miles a day
I began to remember songs
       Old songs

Humming what once I knew
Looking them up 
Until I knew them again

An old man remembering
How it had been
       How it is
How long is life
How short a generation

Singing life up from the Gulf
Across America
Around the Lake

It is a kind of song we sing
Alone and together
       A love song
       A soaring aria
       Something silly
       A lullaby

Sometimes sad
But not mostly


The hills are alive
With a sound like music
A song we have sung
For a million years


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