“Santa Amnesia” by Charles Cobean

Santa Amnesia

Last week, my father’s birthday slid past
unnoticed. It was also his death
-day and the anniversary of my first marriage
so you’d think I’d remember. I confess
I have tried my best to forget
that godforsaken anniversary
but cannot, linked as it is irreversibly
to my father’s parentheticals
which seem to me important to remember
like the names of the capitals, saints, winter birds.
They say this is how it starts, the wrestling
with the days of the week, proper nouns.  
I would like to know just who they are
so we might have a word or two.
Preferably without nouns.
Time drifts, a boat without sails.
Memory mills about like the unemployed
waiting for a good day’s labor.
Blessed Mother, is this the beginning of l’oublie?
Will I remember the faces of my children?
I can see my birds are leaving their branches
Must I rely on dreams now to lead me 
to warmer climes? Even in dreams
I have forgotten what she looked like,
so that’s something. Her eternal twenty
-ness, the eager curl of her smile, her eyes
in which so little could hide,
the whole sprawling mural of her
a sketch now: charcoal lines, smudges.
What time has done.
There’s a mercy in there somewhere
if only I could find it.

Charles Cobean

Charles S. Cobean is the second son of a Cold War submarine captain, an original “nuke,” and is currently living in Nashville, Tennessee. He earned his BA from Vanderbilt and MFA from UCLA. He’s won two Academy of American Poets Awards, a Hollins Literary Festival Prize, a Jim Wayne Miller Prize, the Merrill Moore Award and recently was named a Finalist for the 2024 Laurence Goldstein Prize. Publications include Poets Online, Western Humanities Review, Poem, Jacaranda Review, Aura, Puddingstone, Brownstone Poets Anthology, Fixed and Free Quarterly, Outerbridge, Cumberland Poetry Review, and others. He has also taken part in small-group workshops with Kim Addonizio, Ada Limón, Major Jackson, Lauren Camp, and Ellen Bass (as well as her larger craft workshops).

Headshot: Robert W. Cobean

Photo Credit: Staff