Well, we’ve come to murdering poets and poetesses, and how we’ve descended into the maelstrom of chaos and emotional pandemonium! The invasion of Venezuela and essentially the start of a war (possibly a world war), which was the trifling breeze flowing through the world stage over the weekend is today wafting through the next galaxy over. Now we’re worried about the murder of a poetess.
To stop being ironic, let me show you this:
The car belonged to Renee Nicole Good, who had just dropped her 6-year-old son off at school.
She was driving back home from dropping her kid off at school.
Anybody out there ever done that?
Look at the car.
It’s kind of a mess, isn’t it?
Though not a complete mess by any means. Just the ordinary mess of a basically clean person who is running late and trying to put something nutritious in the damn lunch bag that her kid will actually eat. A woman who is stuck like all of us by herself raising a kid (husband died) and not planning to get killed that day.
So of course she has that green coffee mug in the mug holder which may still have a slug or two of coffee in it. You think the cops are gonna rinse that out?
Nah….
Then there’s that feather, which I have to say is a tip-off. Cars tell all, since they are a bit of the house that we detach somehow to move from home to elsewhere. Cars are not vehicles only. And you will never see a feather in the car of a woman pulling into her reserved parking as CEO of a Fortune 500 company. You will never see a feather in the car of a senior partner in the firm of Cabot, Smith, Lodge and Brattle (the prestigious if imaginary legal firm in Boston, of course).
A poetess, however….
Well, Amy Lodge Lowell may have been the cigar-smoking poetess of highbrow Boston society, but most of us running out the door with our green coffee mug in one hand and our six-year-old son hopefully in the other hand (and the damn paper bag that has the “lunch” left back on the cutting board, of course, because how many hands do you think I HAVE, DAMMIT!)
So the problem Renee Nicole Good had, maybe, was that the lunch was on the cutting board, and the plums that her kid wasn’t going to eat now are completely inedible.
This scenario is completely imaginary, but all of a sudden the world has invaded this poor woman’s life, and everybody is telling you exactly who she is (domestic terrorist / murderess not poetess / radical left-wing lesbian mom who needs a good fuck back into submission).
This woman is dead, and that’s her car up there, so her life is up for grabs, see?
I mean, she’s dead, so we might as well take her life, right?
I mean…
…she’s not using it!
So I get the car thing, because my sister-in-law has a car—imagine that!—if no six-year-old son.
Six-year-old son…
…wonder if he has a name?
…should I google him?
Nah—he still has his life and is using it, unlike his mother, who is dead and not using her life. Which means we can take it, of course.
Anyway, my sister-in-law is a poetess too, which is why she has the feather stuck not onto the dashboard or in the air conditioner vent but on that little barrier island where Renee Nicole Good’s green coffee mug (that the police still haven’t rinsed out—and that was two pages ago!) lives / lived.
Unless, of course, we are not following ancient Egyptian burial practices, in which case a poetess would of course have to be buried with her feather, that vital tool of the trade!
Carpenters have hammers.
Surgeons have scalpels.
Poetesses…
And of course mothers have green coffee mugs, usually capable of holding most of the Baltic Sea, since that’s how they get through their days. Amy Lodge Lowell, whose blood is so blue it makes lapis lazuli green with envy, may be buried with her humidor of cigars, but female poets of the modern day run about with…
You guessed it…
…feathers and mugs.
Surprising what a poet can do, and what a mother can do. Who would have thought, two days ago in Minneapolis, Minnesota, that this mother / poetess would not have emulated dear Amy Lodge Lowell, who publicly smoked cigars and conducted her lesbian relationships with a combination of arrogance and deference that only an entitled but still a do-gooding-spinster-from-Boston-Massachusetts could muster. And who won the Pulitzer in 1926.
Amy Lodge Lowell—and if the name doesn’t automatically stiffen your spine and wonder if your handkerchief is clean, then…
You are not from any part of Boston, where the names “Lodge” and “Lowell” are not names.
They are auras.
They are legacies.
They are very old, very simple, very rich homes of the sort of people who do NOT buy their silver, or the oriental rugs that gleam on their polished walnut floors.
Old things handed down, you know.
Like the trust fund.
Anyway, about Amy Lodge Lowell…
Wasn’t I talking about her?
Let’s take a look at her, sitting where she should be…
This was from a Time magazine article, probably exactly 100 years ago. That’s when Amy Lodge Lowell…
…you know the Lodges from the old poem about Boston (“the Lodges speak only to the Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God”)
…anyway, that’s when Amy Lodge Lowell, the cigar-smoking-poetess from Boston won the Pulitzer.
She was a Lowell, and also a Lodge, of course, which means that she had the very old, very clean house with those old things like the heavy silverware that is always polished and gleaming and the oriental rugs, which are so beautiful that the sheep would die to give their wool for it.
Amy Lodge Lowell may have been a cigar-smoking-poetess, but she conducted herself like a lady (lesbian). We will always remember her sitting in her chair, deeply unfashionable for 1926 but she is a Lodge AND a Lowell and do you think she cares? Of course not! She’ll sit wherever she damn well pleases and smoke her cigar like a lady.
Whereas Renee Nicole Good did the unthinkable, the unimaginable. She dropped off her kid (name unknown, since why take his name, which is about all he has? Father is dead, Mom was living with her female partner, now it’s all gone to shit…)
Anyway, this mother dropped off her kid, looked at him disappear into the school, stuck the feather back in the dashboard, slugged down the penultimate gulp of coffee (gotta rinse that mug, boys!), encountered Federal agents in the street outside her home, turned her car into a deadly weapon, and then had to be killed at point blank through the open car window by this guy…
Well, I’m not going to tell you his name, because he hasn’t been identified formally or charged or indicted or held to trial and found innocent or guilty. So we mustn’t ever, ever, judge him guilty—though shooting a driver through the open window of a car that is obviously trying to speed away from you puts most of us at legal risk. It’s hard to explain tire tracks to the judge, to say nothing of ALL the videos we have seen, since dudes?
We all have cell phones.
Anyway, the heroic man above, having only a moment before escaped death at the hands of (or the car of) a feather-waving, mug-gulping poetess…
He took her out.
Had to, and seeing her blood-stained air bag which was left at the “crime scene” right under the six-year-old’s window for most of the day, for GOD’S SAKE!
…settle down, Marc…
Well, I’ve taken a healing gaze out at the calico cat lying on the hot asphalt of the parking lot behind the club.
People left white roses in the dirty white snow that even clean cities like Minneapolis have to endure.
The white roses…
The dirty snow…
And a foot print—very male, very boot—crushing a drop of blood from the car / weapon of the poetess / murderess.
The poetess is gone.
The feather—and her child—remain.
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