Death of Santa Claus

(The yippee news in on hold — for the moment.)

First took in Charles Harper Webb at the bequest of my modern poetry professor at CSUSB, B.H. Fairchild. He’d invited Harper Webb to read on campus and attendance was requested required — like Fairchild’s order that we each visit the Huntington Library and spend some time with van Gogh’s “Mulberry Tree.” (Ditto with The Getty.)

I owe much of my love for poetry to Fairchild (and I wish I could find a copy of his poem, “Brazil”). It was in his classroom that I learned the grace, beauty and ephemeral textures of typed words — spoken. The way they resonate, touch an eternal truth and break through facades that avert our attentions and numb our senses.

At any rate, I picked up Harper Webb’s chapbook, “Tulip Farms and Leper Colonies,” the other day. And I wondered what else might be out there. This one caught my eye. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

-Christy

Death of Santa Claus

The Death Of Santa Claus

He’s had the chest pains for weeks, but doctors don’t make house calls to the North Pole,he’s let his Blue Cross lapse, blood tests make him faint, hospital gown always flapopen, waiting rooms upset his stomach, and it’s only indigestion anyway, he thinks, until, feeding the reindeer, he feels as if a monster fist has grabbed his heart and won’t stop squeezing. He can’t breathe, and the beautiful white world he loves goes black, and he drops on his jelly belly in the snow and Mrs. Claus tears out of the toy factory wailing, and the elves wring their little hands, and Rudolph’s nose blinks like a sad ambulance light, and in a tract house in Houston, Texas, I’m 8, telling my mom that stupid kids at school say Santa’s a big fake, and she sits with me on our purple-flowered couch, and takes my hand, tears in her throat, the terrible news rising in her eyes. Charles Harper Webb