Douglas Messerli: California Poets Part 10, Five Poems

Douglas Messerli

April 2nd, 2026

California Poets: Part X

Douglas Messerli

Five Poems

How Can I Resist Returning?

                                                     in memoriam Neeli Cherkovski

What does the rattle of bones

do to linger? Love in grand gestures

sweeps through the dangerous curves

of the byways they call the forest.

Terror has rusted the poor Pan,

empty now with snarling dogs

to protect his interests, which happens

to be a black tower of pure porn.

If you stand there long enough

between the white mosquito and

the dwarf of indignation, you will

certainly discover the narrow path

to take you away from the snake.

But then, where does that get you?

The shoulder still aches, the candle

has gone out and the harsh men plod

north, naturally, since that’s where progress

always points. The cling toward what we

felt always pulls back into the diminished

landscape, the low-lying clover and the weed

we call dandy perhaps because it is just enough

to stand out in a sea of endless grass. I’ll

climb the mountain and drop down into

the orgy where the nymphs are born.

Don’t worry, I can take perhaps another

hot heat-up of the racing heart and a pant

or two of recollection. The father always probes

into the meaning of his loss, it’s inevitable

that he can’t see his way into the woods of desertion.

Meadow grass withers, and turns yellow

in the dead creek. But a lovely young boy

stands in the now empty pond to lull in the red sun.

Los Angeles, December 27, 20

Awake Asleep

                           after Robert Duncan

Did I really want to come into the question

of the abyss? You said it was

the moon, but I didn’t believe you,

letting the eagle go as if it was a falcon.

I know a little language, but these days I forget

that speech is surrounding us in every sense.

Old themes keep insisting on their memories. My mouth

is wounded from winding around too many lips.

Ghosts and lovers who won’t give up their howls of what

I guess I couldn’t truly provide: the bliss

of just another moment, the unspoken tongue

which was tied to my gums, the teeth.

Today they are rotten, stars surround

every house, and the angels have shat

on every one they visited. The poem from the heart

is a labor to be forgiven. The solo soul wasn’t

really happy, not because the world wasn’t on his lips.

It was that damn window, that was the sin

for showing us the constellation in which we could not

exist—or was it the lightning of a stormy night lifting

up the rut of those potatoes we left in the corner beside the bed?

I bled red-eyed and simply watched what I should have licked.

But then it opened up, a little frame of vision

and spoke in conversation with light that dark night.

Los Angeles, July 23, 2024

Roots

           after George Oppen

Roots which are themselves simply hopes, hoops

of small self-interest we describe as “leaking

the ancient air in,” which I suppose we didn’t really

even want given the contagion of those crowded dirty

streets. Now we can do only the most horrific of killings

in order to control the black winds, the squalls, and rags

of the forces that disregarded us: and the world changed.

Once upon a time there were fish in the sea. Iron standing

in the midst of the mud, nothing however to hold onto

since the mud and the iron were filled with fire and earth.

We who did the killing claimed no responsibility. The roots

had yet not grown into our bellies, the winds of March, the ides

of iodine upon which we had pasted the pustule of our past.

Therefore young men determined to be young men, a beer bottle

closing the door of continuance. The town was to be negotiated.

The arms I thought to have embraced me were only cannons.

I remember the collar of the winter coat, the tree to where it took

me, and the toss, the roots and the end of my entrance into where

they lay me down to sleep. All the boys accepted them as currency,

the boy who was destined to be lost. There is now a snow-capped

volcano a few miles from here that spit up his name, the familiar

flesh of his familiar disk. He was my brother, my mother, my smother

of so much possibility. I called out to him and called out again.

I called out to him, to his neck, his cheek, even the lips with which

for a few moments only turned me into an adult. All the young men

became fodder, dust for the cannon fire. Earth and iron grown into

the mortar of what we as a generation built upon that muddy plot.

We were not rooted, they reported, in the activity for which they had

put us on the planet. We were not even at the roots of our own desire.

We were not responsible for the winds, the rags, the black plague

which scratched at our throats. The bellies were empty. We were not.

Los Angeles, June 22, 2024

Sound Advice

                          for Michael Davidson

The animal who always appears in such fables

rhymes with blood, becoming someone who naturally

looks like me. I had this feeling preceded by flesh

pounding on the temples of my injustice, the wolf

waiting just outside the city, spilling as all bullies do

the water out of the gene pool.

                                                      Can I still wear denim

to your wedding? It’s a good thing dreams are still

separated into drawers, shuffled around like the

chifforobe of the unintended rape of your good

intentions. I must have donated my genitals

to a worthy cause for the fog to have come over

me so close, the deer gazing through the window

like does always makes a to do for the excuse.

                                                                                  I’ve stopped

answering the phone since no one any longer has one.

Except me, the “palabra of the optimal boorish.” I’m here

to hear you if you want, roaring forks and glasses falling

into the clinks of beer that bear the little bare boy to his

bad tidings. Stroke upon stroke I recall the tympanum

of pitch, the puree of the flower and white milky light

they’re poured into it. I summoned the butterfly to explain

why.

Los Angeles, May 29, 2024

Motive and Opportunity

                                                     for Paul Vangelisti                                            

Stone is moral, the peanuts on the railing, the lusty

shriek of the man waiting in the garden for just your

shadow. Here, no hear, is an old melody, a very sad

lingering of the silly sex song, like a deep assassin,

singing about its conviction for the straggly palm.

South of parody is the night with a quick switch of the light

of the drunken paradise you have created for yourself,

God forbid. That summer when you were a drunken skull

who kept calling me the names of the missing boy who

having fallen off the mountain described the arroyo

in which your tongue had been entrapped, the unending summer’s

idyll of the avenues you had denied me. It happened a century

ago, one step away from yesterday when you simply stomped

into the wide kitchen to open the refrigerator that froze us

to death, just after nudging it open with your elbow pushing

into the well-kept yard of roses, avocado, and lemon trees.

Step round the rickety gate and you’ll see the point of dereliction,

the evil of the commonplace images which we once imagined.

Stone is the moral, that lusty shriek, the peanuts now eaten up.

Alone in the bed, they circle you, those fingers, knuckles, fists.

Los Angeles, January 27, 2024

Author Bio:

Douglas Messerli is a poet, fiction writer, and essayist who was also the creator and publisher of Sun & Moon Press and Green Integer. He has written over 15 volumes of an annual book titled MY YEAR featuring essays on politics, poetry, literature, dance, music, theater, opera and performance each year. He has published 12 books of poetry, a long fiction Letters from Hanusse and two volumes of drama under his pseudonym Kier Peters. His presses have received numerous awards over the years, and Messerli himself was given the French honor Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and in 2024 was awarded Beyond Baroque's Distinguished Service Award for his poetry and publishing. He is currently working on a multi-volume publication, My Queer Cinema: LGBTQ+ Film 1884-2025. The first volume, 1884-1919, will be published this year.