Kendra DeColo’s “I Can’t Stop Thinking about the Room” is our next Pushcart Prize nominee. Below DeColo explains John Coltrane’s influence on her poem, which first appeared in the Summer & Fall 2016 issue of Poetry Northwest.
I love to imagine the rooms in which my favorite artists do their work, the perverse and mundane rituals that ground their labor. When the Paris Review published an article about the house where John Coltrane wrote A Love Supreme, I found myself transfixed by the description of his shag carpet. How it was both magical and domestic. The codeine-purple glow of it infused itself into my imagination and became a part of how I hear his music—otherworldly and rooted among the living. The deep-vein-shimmer-of-a-pigeon’s-feather-mouth-swollen-with-grape-popsicle purple started to seep into my language. I dreamed of sitting in that room, now unoccupied. The poem began as a praise poem for the space that held him—a way to explore the boundary between the galactic and suburban, the holy and the profane, how a room is made sacred by the person who labored inside of it, absorbing, perhaps, resonance from something profoundly ordinary and beautiful as a particular shade of purple, a planet he descended from, coming back to earth. After one “particularly heady five-day spell,” Alice Coltrane described John as “like Moses coming down from the mountain, it was so beautiful. He walked down and there was that joy, that peace in his face, tranquility.”
I Can’t Stop Thinking about the Room
where Coltrane wrote A Love Supreme,
the second floor carpet
plush and piled as a priest’s
robe, the color of a roller rink
at midnight when the slow song
grinds through speakers
and fish scales scatter zodiacs
of light across the smooth floor,
lovers sweating into each others’
fists, scissoring their skates
while the arcade machines and tanks
of neon prizes crackle
and hum, plugged like umbilical cords
into the deep sockets—
I can’t stop thinking of the ointment
sheen, lava lamp ovum
pulsing against the cathedral
of highway sounds
where he wrestled with his angels,
smeared with ink and ash,
an indigo, almost violent
shade of purple, smoldering
like a lounge player’s tuxedo,
the asterisked mouths
of cigarettes burns dim and constellated,
Draco dragging his stalactite
tail over some half-dead sea—
cough syrup glow, spoon
held to a bare bulb. If auras exist,
this is what I choose:
liquor store candescence
of a confessional booth,
a street wet with voices
where I walk, holding the swell
of narcotics transmuted
into testament, holy
itch and resonance
of footsteps pressed
into the shag, this purple life,
making a road out of prayer.
—
Kendra DeColo is the author of My Dinner with Ron Jeremy and Thieves in the Afterlife, selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2013 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, Indiana Review, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
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photo credit: Rubén RG 002/365 Old outside, Young inside via photopin (license)