I'm a teacher at Chapman University in Orange, California. I've also worked as a dramaturg for The Wooden Floor. My poems have appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review and other journals, and I've been nominated for a Best of the Net award for poetry by Lascaux Review. As a grant writer I raised over a million dollars for the social programs of Catholic Charities of the East Bay.



And the Pursuit of Happiness

1.
Do we live in desperate times? Yes and no, 
I want to say—the times have always been desperate.
But why does that make our moment any less
A challenge of despair? So yes and yes,
There are terrible, reparable things about our world.
This afternoon a neighbor, nine years old,
Who lives in Las Vegas with his mother 
And is staying with his grandparents for Thanksgiving week,
Came over to play with my daughter and son.
Soon they were shooting foam balls and tubes 
At one another. Shrieking with laughter,
Happiness. My son was wearing 
A white shirt with a green peace sign. Skating on surfaces,
Emerson recommends somewhere: the essence
Of soundness of mind and good health. 
Don’t be troubled by contradiction or tragedy
Even if you should lose a lover or a son. 

2.
But how enraged he was—Emerson, truly, 
Among many others, by the Fugitive Slave Act.
An economist who has studied
The issue as much as anyone estimates
That there are twenty-seven million people
Enslaved at this moment, the early-mid century. 
The majority, twenty million of them,
More or less, are in debt bondage in India,
And some of those who have been freed have returned
To bondage because they feared
They couldn’t feed themselves and their families. 

3.
Critics disagree about whether there is 
Such a thing as what one recent book calls 
The Emerson Dilemma, the conflict between
His advocacy for social reform— 
Most often abolition—and his cherished theme,
The injunction to follow one’s at times contrary muse.
In a book on education Martha Nussbaum
Quotes the speculations of a psychoanalyst, 
Donald Winnicott, in her argument that every soul— 
Her word—is torn between narcissism and empathy. 
The soul. Emerson certainly believed it exists,
And Nussbaum, a learned philosopher, uses it
In a strong sense to talk about
The neglected predicament of the humanities
Which should but too often do not
Offer a cosmopolitan perspective to students
In the world’s largest democracy, India.
 
4.
To make sense of Emerson’s belief that nature
Is the counterpart of the soul, is the soul externalized,
You have of course to entertain the belief that 
We have souls. I don’t know what to call the force
In my chest that rises and lightens when I see
My children come around the corner with 
The hundreds of others as I stand on the lawn
To meet them after the school day.
The heart, is an obvious candidate. But that’s still
If not a metaphor then a metonymy for the source
Of deep delight they give me, their presence gives me.

5.
There is a certain kind of searching for meaning 
That makes me think of the music of an ice cream truck.
As I sit on the couch in our hotel room 
I can look out the window at the deck and pools,
Which I only need open the door to join: 
We are on the ground floor of the hotel. Watching the comings 
And goings and the splashing I think of my teacher’s
Love for haiku, a form made to capture a perception,
An intimation of meaning, and something too
Of the loneliness of sitting in the role of the observer,
Even if only for a moment remote.
I look for a while for poems in the gathering
Of families on an afternoon around the pool,
And today it seems to me that this impulse is also a defense against
Acknowledgement of the nonsensical essence of life— 
That every adult and child around the pool
Has to make sense out of what is initially
A deracinating flux of perceptions, stranger even than strange dreams
And still in the air a sense of helplessness
At the way this meaninglessness won’t go away for good.

6.
Sunset at the pool deck: lighter bodies leave towels 
And darker bodies pick them up.

7.
One scholar argues that Emerson’s complaint against slavery
Was that it prevented slaves from the self-development
Fostered by working for a wage.
I would like to discover an alternative to
Capitalism on the one hand and radicalism
On the other. Permitting private property is a good thing— 
The alternatives are childish, I’m not afraid to say.
But with debt misshaping the policies
Of so many nations, and environmental destruction— 
Pollution, greenhouse gasses, deforestation,
Extinctions—it seems clear that global capitalism is doing poorly
At providing for the weal of all living things. 
Why am I apprehensive about radicalism?
I do not trust myself to identify a system
That would really work better than global capitalism,
The system that the experiment of history offers.
After all, I have made mistakes.

8.
My ten-year-old daughter asked me if I believe in heaven.
Well, I said, I want to but I can’t. But, I said, 
I really want to, because I don’t like the thought
That we just disappear, that you and I won’t get to hang out.
I know, she said. Then she said: That’s what kept 
The slaves from going kerpluey. They believed that 
In the next life they would be free. Some did, I said.
And some didn’t. I told her about spirituals, 
And my words disappointed me, inevitably,
So I found a recording of “Steal Away” for her and my son.
It was an all white high school choir singing the song
I chose for my father’s funeral, and my eyes burned.
That’s cool, she said after the recording ended. 
I wonder how it sounds when the slaves sing it.