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.


S u n d a y   P a i n t e r


Gilgamesh

The world’s first story is of a misruled city.
Gilgamesh, two-thirds god, tyrannizes the people of Uruk. 
He is pierced by grief for a friend from beyond
The city walls, Enkidu, and learns restraint and judgment
That bring order. Stories are like dreams
That satisfy and comment on the wishes of those who
Create them. The first dream of a city was that the loyalty
Of family, of tribe, would give way to a less jealous
Loyalty and that rule by the father would become not 
Rule by brothers but a harmony among friends
That is guided by the strong. To call this the first dream
Isn’t to remark on what chanced to happen once. 
The first is where the present begins.
Literature begins with the abandonment of the family
And a love of the city that exhausts its critical eye
In the day and sets up camp in the mothering night. 



The Civilizing Process

Norbert Elias, a professor of sociology whose mother
Died in a concentration camp, compared civilization
To a dance in 1968. A lifetime brought him
To this metaphor. In the thirties, he wrote about 
The difference between the German ideas of culture
And civilization. Culture is an ideal of depth 
And authenticity created by a scattered middle-class
Intelligentsia living in burgs. Culture involves 
Spiritual work: its root means tilling the earth. 
It is a thing of bywords and idols and cults. 
Civilization is the name given to itself by 
The court society of Paris, where brilliance
Was set to worldly problems and not sealed off
From the lives of the immensely rich and the poor. 
The temptations of culture must have remained great
To him. Then, as now, the discourse of the nation
Would have been a hopeless wound. Why did he choose
To study the First World as a dance, where the pattern
And the rhythm insist on the life of the past?
I think of a wedding, children dancing very late
Or very early, bride and groom long since gone.