I Am Amazed

—For Susan Duhan Felix

By the Arches Cluster, the most

crowded place in the Milky Way,

jam-packed with stars, 25,000

light-years from Earth in Sagittarius

By Earth, whirling through space,

the only planet known to have

free oxygen, liquid water, whales,

wallabies and redwood forests

By a single redwood tree, 350

feet tall and ten feet in diameter,

standing above the Pacific

since Herod was exiled to Gaul

By a single redwood needle, flat,

with two silvery bands on its

underside and inner machinery

endlessly churning out ATP

By a molecule of ATP, which

carries energy in all the cells

of people and trees, a currency

required for love and breathing

By two children, a boy and a girl,

playing under the tree, who spot

a speckled woodpecker with a red

patch on its head, tapping the bark,

igniting a blaze of amazement

Poem to Give to a Lover

—For Herb

Today, anything goes:

the bay takes a bow when I clap

and birds whistle Bach.

Beads of light roller-skate

above chimneys and roofs.

The air, alive

with pollen grains looking for mates,

insects that glitter like kings,

and germs that bounce

with every breath we take,

moves incessantly

like the tangle of kelp in its water bed

at the end of the pier. The bay

leaps and curls at our feet.

My heart beats faster.

We are seventy percent water:

our proteins, lipids, nucleic acids

and carbohydrates are packaged

in cells of many shapes—

trees, goblets, boxes, ribbons, bells—

surrounded by liquid.

Let's surge and break in ripples!—

in this atmosphere, pulsing with light,

where atoms spin in pairs like tiny lovers

and random paths collide.

“I Am Amazed” First published in Psychological Perspectives (C. G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles).

“Poem to Give a Lover” First published in Berkeley Poets Cooperative.