In "Roller Skate Man," Raymond Souster describes a
disabled man who transports himself on a block of wood that sits on top of roller-skate
wheels; the man propels this gadget by pushing his hands onto the hard
pavement.
The central metaphor of the poem compares this
man and his vehicle to a boat traveling in water:
Steering through the familiar
waters
Heavy with spit, old butts, chewed
gum
Flotsam among the jetsam of this
world.
Flotsam
and jetsam are various kinds of debris from ships that
are found at sea.
More specifically, flotsam (from the word
float) refers to items that are floating because of the natural
action of the sea. For example, pieces of wood from a shipwreck would be called
flotsam.
Jetsam (from the word
jettison, to abandon) refers to items that have been thrown
overboard by a ship's crew. Food scraps, broken tools, (even men thrown overboard as
punishment!) would be considered jetsam.
Souster adheres to
this technical distinction very carefully. He refers to "spit, old butts, chewed gum"
as jetsam, because these are things that have purposefully thrown to the ground. The
Roller-Skate man, however, is referred to as flotsam. No-one has deliberately cast him
to the pavement; rather, he has landed there as a natural consequence of the stormy
waters of
life.
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