GAS Featured Poet: Donna Snyder

Snyder founded the Tumblewords Project in 1995 and still organizes its free weekly workshops in the El Paso borderlands.  She has poetry collections published by Chimbarazu, Virgogray, and NeoPoiesis presses.  Her work appears in such journals and anthologies as Setu, Red Fez, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, VEXT Magazine, Mezcla, Original Resistance, Miriam’s Well, and Speak the Language of the Land. Snyder has read her work in Alaska, California, Colorado, Massachusetts, New Mexico, New York, and Texas

Twitty Baroque

 

The world beyond the stucco house is a highway, 

trucks roaring by like early summer tornadoes, 

the sound of commerce passing through.

 

Mama’s fear and anger echoes in the silence

of the fields that surround us on all sides, 

cotton fields my daddy doesn’t own.

 

Books on the shelf next to the front door,

a gift of charity. Their pictures magnetize

my eyes and fingers. Giotto’s

 

golden halos. Ruben’s corpulent god of drink

forbidden by Southern Baptists. Dionisio

lavish and flagrant in his lusts.

 

Robes rich as the wine of Carvaggio’s world,

excess, dissolution unthinkable to church folk,

gathered to sing a few miles away.

 

My fingers trace stained glass, baroque cathedrals’

magnificent spires high above art’s communion

so unlike Baptist austerity and fear of beauty. 

 

El Greco’s lush colors seduce me, an agony of faces.

Strange and lavish glory, adulation too close to idolatry

to be found in a country church.

 

Our austere gathering of convicted souls. Nude walls

devoid of icons yet filled with the hubris of certitude.

The giver of those books escapes my memory.

 

But the incandescent flesh and vivid colors vibrate still

through time. There were also gifts of heavy records,

handed down to this family.

 

Its genial war hero, a beautiful and brilliant young mother,

three daughters so pretty and bookish. Mama played the music

for me while we were home alone.

 

Daddy at work. The big girls at school. A hand-me-down hi-fi.

The relentless ecstasy of Ravel, the subliminal messages

of Rigoletto, Puccini, Tchaikovsky.

 

Thrilling trills shiver the tin roof of a stucco house

owned by the Boss down at the cotton gin, who

owned everything there in the Twitty flats,

 

even the one room store and post office. Outside,

trucks shift gears, maximize profit, minimizing

transport time. Cotton bolls dance

 

tripolets in dirt blown fields. Dust storms steal my air,

leave me breathless as the beauty of imperfect pearls,

a beauty instilled within me

 

an inchoate reverence for sin.

Glossalalia

 

Born of American blues and Yoruban ways

A whole new art form wails from a reed

Fingers pull tripolets from the upright bass 

Wood and hands ricochet off drumheads 

A mad man gurgles wordless song

A jazzman howls a whole new language

 

Between something foreign yet homegrown

language creates itself, a mad excitement

Fire burns through nerves. The jazzman

hurls prayers outside Pentecostal temples 

on the Street of the Crosses, the City of Angels

A gurgle of impenetrable language shouted

 

Fronterizo jazzman channels a love supreme

Touched by holy fire he speaks in tongues 

The laws stop at the border of his lips

Ecstatic utterances scream a tongue’s secrets

Serpents twine flesh/a Lilith born of the desert

flees a cultivated garden/runs for the frenzied border

 

Serpent tongues tattoo lightning across green sky

Meaning flickers from tongue to sax to God’s ear

A Goddess serpent twines around sunbright flesh

The gift of tongues unknown below sin’s heaven

La frontera a bridge between meaning and Babel

The tongue's secrets transmuted into frenzied sound