Posted 2:29 PM by melanie

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Help I'm trapped inside of a poem; no really, I think I am going to put this one to rest, for now. I may work on it later.1-5-03

(this is a piece that I continue to work on, it grows, evolves, and changes daily)

Reflections


Ed and I boarded the Ferry that takes passengers from Port Clinton, Ohio to Put-n-Bay Island, a tourist destination on Lake Erie

I sat at the back of the boat on a metal bench, I propped my feet up on the rail, and surveyed the immediate area

From my two story vantage point, I could see a grocery store and a seafood restaurant where we had just eaten fried walleye filets

across from me was the garage that Ed's great grandfather John had owned; the parking lot still had the old man's name etched on the brick wall

and then I looked at the harbor with its sailing vessels, mahogany cabin cruisers, fishing boats, and small black and white dwarf lighthouse

A diverse crowd begins to gather on the deck, a whole group of corporate kids (middle aged business men and their underlings)

in their matching red company blazers, around 20 of them, laughing, leering, stumbling, intoxicated, flirting and chatting with all the women.

grandmas, grandpas, and teenagers, in Hawaiian shirts, tank tops, blue jean shorts, straw hats, flip flops and tennis shoes, all laughing and going to get drunk.

The ferry powered up and began moving across Lake Erie's, grayish-white wave tossed waters; I stared at the whisps of cloud against a blue sky

and the disappearing, storm faded, old city buildings of downtown Port Clinton and the docks and pylons alternating with the wake of the boat

I wondered why he’d ever left a place so beautiful, then I thought about a time when he and I lived in Louisiana at Head of Island on the Amite river.

He was exasperated with me as I tried to direct him in the proper boarding of a Batto as we piled in to go to Lake Marepaus to fish for our dinner.

He was so much fun; he woke up every morning and stood at the end of our pier in his undershorts and sang the Banana Boat song at the top of his lungs.

Our neighbor across the river was a chef from Detroit who cooked Cajun food at a local hotel and he would come outside and sing with him.

I would listen to their voices mingling with the fog and the sound of splashes as they checked trot lines and hauled in our meals for the day.

I turned and stared at the sun, closed my eyes for a minute, and let the wind blow at my hair, beating against my forehead in a wild pattern

Ed tapped my arm and hugged me, placing his chin in the curve of my neck, before he took his Harachi clad feet up the metal steps to the next deck

to talk with a pretty brown, wavy haired, dark eyed, girl of sixteen who was all dressed in freckles, laughter, and a white halter top sundress.

I looked back at the Victorian style, prohibition era, summer homes with their gazebos and the ivy crawling lattice work and the red and yellow rose bushes.

and the wild grasses of the islands dotted with red cardinal flowers, orange trumpet creepers, white bone-set flowers, and acres of hardwood;

cottonwood, green ash, juniper, dogwood, oak, maple, and elm, growing along and beyond the rocky banks of the meandering shoreline as we sped past;

I felt the misty foam touch my face like early morning dew and I looked in the distance at the faint bluish purple traces of the Canadian shore.

It occurred to me that I was lucky to be there. That if I had never believed in Ric, or his music, or his poetry, or his life song

I would not have a curly headed teenage son who laughs, cries, sings, and shouts with the perfect timing of his musician father

I can hear his father’s voice echo in the many mansions of his mind like a haunting melody in the dance of his footsteps, his life, and in his voice.

I thought about our ferry ride and I stared deep into the shimmering blue-gray waters of Lake Erie; the wind continued to blow my hair in a carefree way.


I imagined his soul in the moist breeze on the ends of my eyelashes

I imagined his soul through the vibration of the motor on the pads of my feet

I imagined his soul smiling inside me like a sated feeling in the bottom of my stomach

I imagined his soul in the waves that rocked the ferry and moved my shoulders back and forth

I imagined his soul in the rhythm of my heart as it beat faster when the boat picked up speed

I imagined his soul like a dolphin dancing in the waves splashing along behind us in the lake

I imagined his soul on the tip of my tongue like something I’d forgotten to say; the last time I saw him hair damp in the rain

I imagined his soul in the refracting, shifting, and changing beams of sunlight that rippled and sparkled on the water

I imagined his soul laughing in the green tree tops of the hardwoods and pine growing along the gray craggy cliffs

I imagined his soul flying with the sea gulls swooping down to the frothy swirling water up to the clouds and finally free

I imagined his soul singing with the birds; I could hear his strong sad life song enduring in their cries, and chest beat of wings

I imagined his soul in the steady damp breeze that tousled my hair and blew at my dress and touched every inch of my skin

I imagined his soul in the rustling of clothing and footsteps and in a dozen different conversations in the crowd around me

I imagined his soul in the eyes of our son as he smiled at me and leaned over the rail to feel the foam-born splash of water

I imagined his soul in the gusts that billowed and powered the sails of a passing ship

I had a long friendly talk with him and in my head

I talked to the sky and the lake and the wake of the boat and the seagulls trailing along

I talked to the houses that lined the shores and sail boats docked in the harbor.

I talked to the clouds, and the sun, and the spirit that was Ric

I said thank you to Ric and thank you to God

Thank you for giving me this day, thank you for this healthy son

Thank you for the chance to be here

Thank you for the chance to see what you saw when you were growing up

Thank you for the chance to meet your family and your friends

then I knew, it was so obvious, that I almost missed it.

God is easy to see, so easy that sometimes we overlook the blessings that are abundant in our lives.

Our trek, our journey, our visit, our pilgrimage to Port Clinton and to Lake Erie

to visit the grave of my son‘s father was all meant to be

He was the only man I ever really loved,

I love you Ric and I will always love you.

Mel Zetzer

Posted 12:03 PM by melanie

RIALTO

We left Rialto, California with $200 dollars; two loaves of French bread and 3 pounds of sharp cheddar. We thought that we had enough money for gas to make the drive to Baton Rouge, and we could sleep on the road and maybe pinch pennies to buy coffee. My friend Renee was waiting for us back in Louisiana; she said we could stay with her as long as we needed.

Our car was loaded down with musical equipment. We had Ric’s CB 700 drums and a set of Zildjian cymbals crammed into the backseat. I was three months pregnant. It was early March and at night we wore two sets of clothes and wrapped ourselves in indian blankets because we had no heat. We didn’t care. We were happy, stupid, and free.

When we got hungry we tore into the French bread and cheese and fed it to each other, we listened to the radio, or talked, or Ric would pull out his guitar and sing, and make up funny verses to go with pop songs that usually had something to do with one legged syphilitic prostitutes or fat men who couldn’t make it through the door of the pay bathroom at the airport.

We listened to ourselves talking at 75 miles an hour, and the rhythm of the tires on the pavement, per cussed to the wheels hitting the seems of the rebuilt highway, and every now and then, a pot hole in the road would set off a cymbal, we would hear a loud crash and it would startle us, and make us look at the shining Zildjians in the back seat, and then we would laugh, and talk and sing, even faster and stare at the bright sun beating down on the endless miles of desert, and roadside Stuckey’s signs with thirsty yellow diamond sands on either side of the black tar highway.

When we got to the mountains in New Mexico, it was 12 degrees outside, and we were freezing, the right passenger window in our car was broken , we didn’t have any heat, and there was ice on the inside of the windshield. It was about 12 o clock at night.

Ric got us a free motel room. It was a little mom and pop motel in the mountains in New Mexico. We were driving through town and we saw a sign that said, “Praise The Lord/ Vacancies.”

We pulled into the drive and Ric spied a picture of Jesus through a window hanging on the wall of the lobby.

So he walked in and said in his best mid westerner accented DJ/gospel preacher voice, “Praise the Lord. I think I found the right place. Could you offer some humble travelers Godly assistance?”

The owner was a little old lady, maybe about 70, she had gray hair in a prim bun, and big over size reading glasses, and she was embroidering something. I think it was the second part of a collection of the entire Psalms, she had the other verses hanging on her wall, next to a picture of an auburn haired blue eyed praying Jesus with little lambs and cherubs and harps.

She said, “ Well praise the Lord the son we don’t usually give our rooms away.”

Ric, looked at her and said, “I understand that, Mam, but you see my wife is pregnant” and he patted my belly for emphasis.

She relented, and we repented, and she gave us a cozy little room with a view of mountains, and told us we could stay until check out the next day at noon.

We snuggled down into the soft mattress, and she called our room to make sure the sheets were clean and the heat was on, and we said in chorus “Yes, Mam and Praise the Lord”

We giggled, turned off the lamp, and proceeded to “Praise the Lord” all night long to the muted neon light blinking through the soft beige curtains.

Posted 6:10 PM by melanie

Try To Catch a Falling Star

My son’s great grandfather John was a gangster pilot
He was the flying Zetzer of Port Clinton, Ohio.

A very brave Rumrunner
Who once flew the last member

Of Ma Barker’s gang from Ohio to Arkansas
While on the run from J Edgar Hoover.

50 years later in a honkytonk in Hot Springs.
I met his grandson Ric Zetzer
He was 6’1, 24 years old, with long blonde curls.

He was gorgeous and he carried around a guitar
He could sing and play like Buddy Holly.
And he knew the words to every Elvis song.

Ric was like the first sip of beer on a cool keg
And I still Savor that very first taste.

We stayed together for three years.
On the road from Arkansas to California and then Louisiana.

I still miss him

I made the first drive to his hometown, this year
Port Clinton, Ohio.

We went to see Ric’s grave and I had to introduce my son
To a cold piece of marble as his father.

He was the grandson of the grandest old man
Someone who once towered over the sky

Both had brilliant lifetimes like meteors.

Their polished stones are grounded to the earth

John’s has an airplane’s on it.

Eddie and I pushed back the stone on Ric’s grave
and we left our armbands from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
and a picture of Eddie smiling.

We fell in love with a picture of Ric’s father
I never met Robert Zetzer, John’s son
He died before I met Ric.

We named our son after him
Now I have his portrait
And I loose myself inside of his Brown eyes.

I’ve had the most beautiful man in the world
With me for years.

He is my child and theirs, too.

So much a part of them and so like them
He is every bit as handsome and charming as his father.

My son Eddie Robert could melt ice with his gaze.

I didn’t know it was going to happen
Falling stars are like that.

They grant wishes and dazzle you

They make the sun and the moon seem unimportant.

They never leave your memory for your whole lifetime

You only get to see them for a little while

And then they disappear leaving silver traces on the clouds.

A plume of smoke and a bright, bright, bright, light.

Mel Zetzer (for Ric, John, and Robert Zetzer) 2002

I said a while back that I had some of Ric's poetry. Here’s one. He wrote this one in jail.

Trip Through the Lair

I write a million letters
I never get replies
There are few familiar faces
in this little world of lies.

Shadows dim of strangers
And long forgotten fears
Once considered dangerous
over many, many, years.

I'm another screaming metaphor
Running in the night
With Armageddon's door ajar
And God's eternal light.

Silver rings of Purgatory
Set inside a rock
The years blend together differently
My God unplug this clock

A martyr played the odds again
I never won a hand
Now I’m a stationary traveler
In never, never, land

R Zetzer 1960-1994

Posted 5:22 PM by melanie

Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

(My very favorite part of the Bill of Rights)

Posted 6:09 AM by melanie

About The Poisoned Ink Well

I'm changing the name of my journal to fit my conditions and my lifestyle.

Posted 5:39 PM by melanie

For Marie and Renee

If I have to consider the death of my father, then it would be impossible, not to remember the death of my other mother (a lady who helped raise me) due to breast cancer. She died about a month after he passed away. I received the call and news of my father’s death while visiting her daughter, who was my best friend. We were having coffee and her mother was talking to me about the clothes she had chosen to wear for her own funeral. We were shocked, it was so unexpected to hear the news of his demise as we prepared for her death.

My friend was working tirelessly doing all the nursing care for her mother. It was one more cancer death in a family already scarred by their time in the Delta Region with one person after the next dying for what seemed like a death every year. I attended many more funerals than weddings in Louisiana in my youth and I used to keep my wardrobe of dark dresses at the cleaners, always ready for these occasions. (People raised in Louisiana know what I am talking about)


We were both in our early twenties when her mother passed away in 1986. Her Mom was wearing the blue chiffon she had picked out and all of the pink and yellow roses and carnations were arranged exactly the way that she’d asked.

She said it stormed at every family funeral, and I remember during her mother‘s funeral, we were sitting next to each other under the velvet canopy, and we heard a clap of thunder, and then an abrupt down pour began, it was so fast that everyone standing on the outside rushed in at the same time.

She looked at me, with her big brown eyes, and grabbed my arm, and smiled in a tired, half hearted way, and whispered in my ear “ I knew something was wrong and I just couldn’t figure out what it was. I thought that we had forgotten to do something. But that’s what it was. It wasn‘t raining. I’m kind of relieved. We‘ve never had a funeral without rain” I smiled at her and hugged her.

Around us everyone was leaning in and huddled together, in a damp mass.

She lost her father to brain cancer, her mother to breast cancer, one of her grandmother’s to lung cancer, and another grandfather to cancer. They lived next to a canal in the city where they dumped lots of pesticides and chemicals. At one time, there was a City Parish Nursery just across the ditch from them. She lost almost her whole family in ten years time. Already by the age of 11 they had found a benign tumor on her breast.

Now she is busy raising her own four boys, with very little help or support. I think she was trying to replace all of the people she had lost over the years.

Her family would have loved to have helped her, but most of them are situated, quite different, these days. You can find them, anytime, down the block from Cortana mall, on a cozy side street, under some trees, next to a lake, and six feet down.

Posted 1:43 PM by melanie

And later after I had my dream, I was sweeping the hardwood floors in my parent's house, and out of the corner of my eyes, I watched as the Challenger exploded on the screen of the color TV, and I stopped and marveled for a moment at being witness to their deaths, as I swept out cobwebs and dust, and then Reagan came on, and we cooked macaroni and cheese for dinner, and we sat on the couch, and propped our feet up on the brass and glass coffee table, at the center of my known universe, and we ate quietly, and watched and listened as that president gave us, yet another one of his cliché laden speeches.

The national and global stage looked so tiny to us, that year, inside of that 19 inch box, with it's exploding spaceships and doddering, old, gray haired presidents, as we gave away clothes (suits, ties, and dresses), put their favorite memento's in boxes, and boarded up our parent's houses for the final time and said good bye to each other.

Posted 12:53 PM by melanie

I can remember a time in between those funerals when me and some friends went out and we lay in the high grass and dry mud of the Mississippi River Levy (before the casinos) and we smoked weed and watched the tug boats and traffic on the bridge and I thought about doing a slow dive into the murky waters (climbing to the highest girders of the bridge and doing a swan dive into the river) and I stood up and threw chunks of dirt instead, aiming for the barges, that lumbered up and down the river like slow moving dinosaurs; and we talked about life, and friends, and family, and we vowed not to have funerals at all (for ourselves), “ they were just a waste of time and money” and we returned home and drank Yagermiester out of the bottle and sat on the back porch and ate homemade pecan pie, and I fell asleep in a chair, and I dreamed about nuclear war. I watched as the bomb dropped over the water, and in my sleep, I could feel the impact, and I could feel myself burning, and I closed my eyes tight, and I prayed in my dream, and I felt the red heat searing against my lids, and I awoke to the afternoon sun shining in my face.

{Please, excuse the suicidal ideation. I like to call it whimsy and as a side note; I have had friends who worked on the river and they said that whenever they saw a jumper that they would motion them down and yell "JUMP YA DUMBASS" at the top of their lungs, so no way way could I ever face the indignity of going over the bridge; it would make some people in that town, too happy!}