Dean Ellis, Three Poems

I first encountered Dean Ellis when he took part (as poet) in an exhibition I organized of collaborative projects by writers and photographers. He turned out to be not only a poet, but a translator from Portuguese, an expert on Brazilian music (and lots of other music), and a sometime bartender at one of New Orleans’ best restaurants—an incomparable quadruple threat! (That he doesn’t mention the latter in his bio note is an insufferable display of humility.) His poems here participate in the great Romantic project of psychologizing the alien—taking the unknown, and perhaps unknowable, and registering its psychic (we’d say cognitive, now) effects in images. As in the best of Wordsworth and Keats, especially, there’s a deep investment here in the in-between, in gaps, absences, and particulars elusive of denotation—things in a mystifying middle, thrown into the world awaiting us, to be processed, even mastered. Of course this begins in a sublime and dauntingly mythic environment, reshapes itself into a discourse on (cinematic) images, takes a swerve through Graham Greene and Marguerite Duras, and ends in dreams—the movies that all of us make. Inasmuch as what we call “media” are fundamentally image machines, Dean’s poems are messages from our middles.

Cecil B., Boca Raton

Cecil B. paddles

a red kayak in fading

sunlight, heedless

of circuses and Biblical

epics. The sea is his

template, the horizon

a huckster, the current

his only commandment.

The breeze is a bullhorn,

he speaks through it

with sinewy wrists turned

against the flickering

sky. Jodhpur oars tread

the ingénue tide, breaker

hordes approach, await their

cue. The sea cleaves,

his breast swells with

vernal gusts. He sees the stars

concealed behind a curtain

of clouds, the Creation

that will never be His.

Cinéma Vérité, a Glossary of Terms

Soft focus: he distrusts

memory and relies on the

memory of memory.

Wide angle: the breadth

of his longing attenuates

the gaps.

Long shot: she tumbles

into the gaps and is

nurtured there.

Jump cut: he awakens

to time and its cruel

tricks.

Tracking shot: she refuses

to exit the panorama

of his vision.

Mise en scene: what one

sees is what one sees,

and isn't.

Denouement: there is no

such thing as resolution,

only last scenes.

Upon Falling Asleep While Reading The Quiet American Or Maybe While Watching The Film Version Not The Original But The Superior Remake With Michael Caine Or Maybe It Was The Lover By Duras Or Maybe It Was The Film Version

Once I rode a rickshaw

with Graham Greene he

told me, as the driver's

vertebrae creaked forward,

and groaned a doleful

chorus with the wooden

wheels, you suffer as much

as the driver, you see, because

you are his burden and he

yours. It took me years

to learn this, he said,

and I am still learning. But

why then, I asked, do you

still take rickshaws? Because,

he said, they need my business

and I am too lazy to walk. And

then I awoke from the bubble-

wrapped dream, and tore the

cellophane from my eyelids,

and knew, quite unknowingly,

that I would never ride

a rickshaw, or know anyone

who ever knew anyone who

knew Graham Greene.

Dean Ellis is a writer and translator living in New Orleans. His work has appeared in The New Orleans Review, Bloodroot, Another Sticky Valentine, the St. Petersburg Review, the online series Working Stiff at PBS.org and the KGB Bar Lit Magazine. His translation (with Jaime Braz) of Jacinto Lucas Pires' novel The True Actor was published last fall by Dzanc Books. He hosts the radio programs Tudo Bem and The Dean's List on WWOZ-FM 90.7 in New Orleans and online at http://www.wwoz.org/.