Ed Skoog
PAT WALLECK’S LEG
[epistolary]
Ed Skoog
PAT WALLECK’S LEG
[epistolary]
I won it in a poker game, his leg,
the first prosthesis a cross
between grasshopper and trombone,
scraped up from when his girlfriend
shoved him down the long steel stairs.
We never talked him into the Walnut River
where minnows nibbled our hair,
our bench a submerged upriver elm.
Instead he tossed us beers from the bank,
and menthol cigarettes in Ziploc.
Fake leg unstrapped from stump,
he could have leapt in head first,
and swam. But would not. He died
at twenty-eight. I avoided him at the end.
When his leukemia came yawning
out of hibernation, I made my clumsy
pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Roch
on St. Roch Street, surrendered my prize
to the room where other hopers had left
braces, trusses, videotaped mastectomies,
plaster casts of hands feet elbows faces.
Pat’s leg made the shrine a leg show
for an audience of unblinking Jesus
and St. Lucy’s eyes on a platter.
Do your work, I asked the statues, not seeing how.
In the best elegy for my friend,
which this can’t be, he’d be left high
on the riverbank watching us
across the slow water. Back then he knew
more than we could fool ourselves about. Let alone now.
Ed Skoog's poems have appeared in NO: a journal of the arts, Fourteen Hills, Poetry, Poetry Daily, The New Republic, and Slate.com. A pamphlet of his poems, Field Recordings, is available from Seattle's LitRag Press. He lives in snowy, mountainous Southern California.
Other works on Sidebrow: Season Finale, Dog Highway & The World-Famous Topeka Zoo