POETRY: A GAME OF PONTOONS

A GAME OF PONTOONS


(For Mikey)


Mikey* bested his cousins in the game of balancing on the lily pads (mock pontoons) while crossing the pool without falling into the water before he gets to the last pontoon. This ancient mariner, bedazzled by his grandchildren’s confidence and derring-do, failed to even get past the first pontoon despite their egging him on: Come on, ‘lolo! You can do it! Just do it! --- Writer's Notebook on a Family Break


He leap-frogged lithely
with tentative grace
from one drifting lily pad
to the other, an uncertain smile
creased on his elfin face:
quite like relishing
the exquisite danger
of leaping from one life
moment to another
shorn of anxiety or fear
a fall could end it all.**


Would the pontoons hold
while he teeters on them
grasping for absent branches?


His final leap was also
this old heart’s leap of faith
that this lad’s leap-frogging
will end in a crash of pool
where ripples are his balm
and sinking is his baptism
of fire in a game called living
where bridges crumble
with the tottering pontoons.


--- ALBERT B. CASUGA
Mississauga, September 15, 2010


*Michael Albert Casuga, sixth grandchild, at the water park in Niagara’s Great Wolf Lodge.

La Familia

** From the Writer's Notebook

For archival purposes, I am including in this postscript the original version of the first part of the above poem. While it had metrical and prosodic integrity, it was hard put objectifying the teeter-tottering leap-frogging of the persona in the poem's narrative. One convenient way of ideographically capturing the movement of the objective correlative is to use short, irregular lines that followed quick breath patterns akin to the persona's while jumping from one pontoon to the other. The poet's function is to choose the best image that could help objectify the gestalt that best registers the central image of the poem, its main structure.

I leave the student of the poem's tools to judge which version is more effective in achieving the artistic purpose of the poem.

He leap-frogged lithely, with tentative grace

from one drifting lily pad to the other,
an uncertain smile creased on his elfin face:
quite like relishing the exquisite danger

of leaping from one life moment to another

shorn of anxiety or fear a fall could end it all.

A Game of Pontoons: A Re-view
September 16, 2010
Mississauga