Three Poems by Dwayne Martine

Red Rock Meditation  

I collect shadows

   as I walk

into the twilight

   ridden piñon,

lulled into the sky,

   uncertain,

hushed by work strangers

   each of us

hauling armfuls of

   the quiet

like gathered cedar

   firewood.

We climb towering

   Entrada,

red sandstone cliffs near

   my birthplace,

along a razor

   wire fence,

carting a backpack

   of sixers

and a liter of

   Bacardi,

up a trail not

   intended

for uninducted

   visitors,

ascending until

   only gas

refinery lights,

   the risen

moon and our closing

   distances

compel us forward.

   We do not

look down because there

   is nothing

else, gathered around

   the fire

with each other, but

   this first drink,

this last imbibed dark

   communion

to lives lived edge close,

   burden free,

balanced between work

   and future,

memory and night,

   not yet reeled

into tragedy’s

   elegant

device. We drink and

   laugh as each

devastation of

   a failed

transmission or a

   remembered

four-hundred year old

   hurt melts and

is forgotten in

   the liquid

warmth of precipice’s

   darkened clutch.

In a still moment,

   as the wind

shifts and the laughter

   stops, I pray

this night to never

   end, I pray

to halt our peace-flight

   march to the

inexorable

   red stone brink.

Imperial Nostalgias

a Navajo Film

Looking into the mirror, I could

be anyone:  an Italian, Latin,

dirty Burt Reynolds in another

feather. I’m sweating under

these thousand stage lights, my

skin burning and dripping like

wax, yet still I return for revenge,

for a white man’s love, for

easy justice, for a place where

civilization’s word does not

apply but my anger does. Just

because there are no real

redskins here doesn’t mean it

shouldn’t be about a semblance

of us. Just because I’m not real

doesn’t mean the hot, mineral

redness I’m painted with comes

off easily or that revenge isn’t

the reality. They want to shoot

my eyes out so I do not rise

from the dead, hungry for more

revenge. They want to bound

my hands so I do not strike them

down hapkido style. They want

my broken English to mean I am

real, that I am not immediate to

the nightmare hiding under my

beaded headband and black hat.

They want my studio silence so

these screams will seem rehearsed.

They want movie justice so this

burning reality is the real illusion.

Autochthonous Tercets

I take the material of this tired, burdened life

and fret it with my thumb until the edges fray

and the weave tears into stops and longs strips

of midnight. These long unraveled segments

have just enough strength left to strangle

my enemies, tie and burden my family, hang

me from something tall. Shimásani, my

Grandmother was a sheepherder, a divorcée,

a Harvey Hotel waitress and a weaver.

She lived through Riverside Boarding School,

her first husband, broken stories and the loss

of a child. She wove and wove:  the language

of her birth, the rudeness of the bilágaana,

the places of her life and the private spaces

in her mind. I weave the language of my

alienation, the rudeness of white people,

the places of my life and the private spaces

in my mind. She wove the loss of another

child, a husband, knowing the world. She wove

her grandson’s face. She kept the hundred

by hundred foot rug of her life by her side,

leaving one imperfection in the august weft

to be teased out and questioned. I weave anew

into this newly unwoven life the carded dawn

of her memory, the few threads, patchworks,

imperfections of a woman whose life is to be

remembered obliquely, without her name spoken.




Dwayne Martine is a Jicarilla Apache/Navajo poet living in Tucson, AZ. He has been published online and in print. He works as a professional writer and editor.