Poem

James Lineberger

body and soul

when we lived in decatur
there was this young guy next door
eighteen nineteen years old
and out there in his father's car port he
was building a sailboat
a seventeen foot overnighter his little brother said
that when he was done he was going to
take it to california
on a trailer and launch it from somewhere around
redondo beach where he had stayed
a few times with their mother
who lived there after the divorce until she died
in the hospital when problems developed
after some minor surgery so here
was this upside down skeleton of a boat laying across
a couple sawhorses
and the guy who was an apprentice mechanic in the press room
at the atlanta constitution
would come straight home on the first
number five bus and work way into
the night bending the ribs and sanding stuff down
pegging this or that thing together
what the hell
do i know about boats but then he got swooped off
to viet nam and it couldn't have been
but just a few months before he was dead too
down in a burning helicopter
in some godforsaken place where there was no water at all
and by the time they finally could get in
to look for survivors there wasn't enough of him left
to put in a canteen cup one of the other relatives told us
so there was a funeral and a marker
in the cemetery but like a lot of others he never
came home not really
and about a week after the funeral we woke up one sunday
to find the guy's father working
on the boat which
was understandable everybody has to do these things
their own way only he had on his old uniform
from the korean war
except it wouldn't hardly button around him at all
and he was slopping red paint all over
the unfinished hull
which was still stitched together like his son had left it
when he went away
just some naked ribs with a dark hole underneath
where a dirty canvas hung down that was supposed to be
the sail one day
only as it started to get dark
the man pulled the canvas over the sticky wet spars
like a shroud and brought out
a bunch of photographs
of his wife and the boys and lined them up on the canvas
and when we finally stopped
staring out the window
and i made up my mind to go pay a visit and see
if there was anything i could do
like can anybody ever do anything in a situation like that
but you have to make the gesture right
only when i got there he was just sitting
on the stoop
still wearing his wool uniform
all hot and sweaty from the his efforts
and we didn't either one of us say anything for a while
until he finally just gave
a feeble wave toward the boat and said
you know mister lineberger i am a elder at the church
of the holy redeemer and i respect
the triune god i guess as much as any man
but the way i look at it now there comes a time
when a person has to ask
what goddamn good is the soul without the body

James Lineberger

James Lineberger is a professional screenwriter and playwright. His rock opera, The Survival of Saint Joan, was developed at the Buffalo Studio Arena, and the production transferred to Broadway. His screen adaptation for the Twentieth Century Fox film of the Devery Freeman novel Father Sky was filmed as Taps. His poems have appeared in a number of online zines, and in the following print publications: Berkeley Poetry Review, Exquisite Corpse, Hanging Loose, Hayden's Ferry Review, New York Quarterly, Ontario Review, Oxford Magazine, Pembroke Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Snake Nation Review, Sonora Review, The New Laurel Review and Verse.

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