He’s had 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 gowns always flap
open, 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.
The poet Charles Harper Webb is a professor of English at California State University, Long Beach, where he directs the MFA program in Creative Writing. For many years Webb was also a psychotherapist in private practice. “The Death of Santa Claus” is from Webb’s Shadow Ball: New and Selected Poems, published in 2009 by the University of Pittsburgh Press, and is reprinted with permission. The author’s photograph is by Karen Schneider.
He’s had 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 gowns always flap
open, 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.
The poet Charles Harper Webb is a professor of English at California State University, Long Beach, where he directs the MFA program in Creative Writing. For many years Webb was also a psychotherapist in private practice. “The Death of Santa Claus” is from Webb’s Shadow Ball: New and Selected Poems, published in 2009 by the University of Pittsburgh Press, and is reprinted with permission. The author’s photograph is by Karen Schneider.
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