While you sleep I trace the tender
green stalk of your wrist.
Over the upturned Earth of your palm
and along each curled stem of your fingers
tipped with marigold. Warm rainwater
pools between our two hands pressed together
like wet leaves. The frown lines etched
into your forehead remind me of tree rings
or keys of a wheezing accordion –
smoothing then wrinkling again.
Its song whistling through your nose on
lazy morning-breaths. Whispering
in and out of the thousand golden Aspen leaves
quaking from my untrimmed chest.
Your blooming into my life marked the end
of the longest drought season.
I smell the dust settling. Hope taking
root beneath the arid soil.
Love’s monsoon moving in over the horizon,
heavy with a blessing rain.
– mrg
Feb 14, 2021
Feb 14, 2021 at 12:50 PM UTC
No matter if the universe is an accordion.
However many parallel worlds
may be wheezing in the folds of its bellows.
No matter how many other
versions of ourselves there are
stumbling around in circles in the dark,
retracing our footsteps from a past life
in the next. No matter if we’re all pawns
pushed around the chess board
to someone else’s gain – I like to think
we find each other in every single reality.
A thread binding our fates that neither time
nor space can sever.
I choose you over and over.
– mrg
Jul 21, 2020
Jul 21, 2020 at 9:50 PM UTC
Many moons have risen and set
over the desert since quarantine
began, and now
I am losing steam
Stopped reading my horoscope
I get high earlier and earlier in the day
A method to combat my mounting stress
as this country chugs up and up towards
the evasive summit of this pandemic
Surely there must be some other way
to transform all this nervous energy
than digging my heels deep into the
locomotive floor, through iron
and dirt below
But the usual channels are blocked
Besides, nothing I write can stop the days
from passing
One into the next like railroad track
building itself beneath each spark
thrown by another revolution of steel
Or keep our unqualified conductors
from ushering us forward, foaming
at the mouth, closer and closer to
the end of the line
A train wreck the people won’t survive, but
the economy will.
– mrg
May 24, 2020
May 24, 2020 at 6:48 PM UTC
One day, I will summit
the mountain of my own mind
Rocky and daunting as the
trail may be
How many times
has the pickaxe of a thought
struck gold in a vulnerable vein –
the sheer cliff face crumbling
away beneath my clenched fists
filled with loose gravel?
Or the crevasse of a memory
opened up without warning,
threatening to swallow me whole?
I have been buried beneath
avalanche after avalanche of anxiety,
lost my footing just as the
peak came into view through
early-morning mist
As many failed attempts as it takes,
I will keep climbing toward the
pinnacle of my potential
where all the fears and doubts
that towered over me once
will seem microscopic from
such a staggering height.
– mrg
May 5, 2020
May 5, 2020 at 8:16 PM UTC
I want to quit my job
at the restaurant
Escape with my beloved
to a mild-weathered mountain-
sweet spot
Put hammer to nail
and start building
our lives’ work
Plant the seeds our children
will watch bud, blossom
and fruit
if we ever have any
I want as many long years
together as we can get
I want to live to be 100
I want to watch the world
evolve into a state I can bear
to leave it in – in peace
I want to open my eyes
in a place I know God exists
where the souls of everyone
I love welcome me in an embrace
of feathered wings
I want them to say: “See?
You were right! We’ve been
here all along.”
More than anything,
I want you by my side
And if the time comes
to make the long journey
in another body,
I want you to follow me
into the next life.
– mrg
Apr 29, 2020
Apr 29, 2020 at 7:35 PM UTC
Through the windshield,
the moon hangs low
and enormous in a sky
of frozen obsidian
We sidewind through
the neighborhood
for a better look at
her face
It is harder than it used to be
to see the moon
She materializes in and out of
the rows of houses, emerges
from the silhouette of one
pruned hedge before diving
behind another
We chase her
to the top of the hill,
passed the last lonely
skeleton of a streetlamp
where she glowers down over
the rooftops uninterrupted
like the massive, golden
eye of God.
– mrg
Apr 7, 2020
Apr 7, 2020 at 10:12 PM UTC
The window in my childhood
bedroom facing southeast
hasn’t changed –
Same scratched sill, torn
screen
Sticking in the same place
when opened too wide –
but the world beyond it has
People walk their dogs
wearing surgical masks
The hospitals spill over
like cupped palms beneath
a broken faucet
And yet beyond the window,
the world goes on:
The absentminded Aspens
shiver in the gusting wind
Shaking their leaves like
tiny tambourines
The cattle graze in the
pasture, unbothered
And the familiar saw-
toothed silhouette of the San
Juans lords over it all
as it has for thousands of
years before me, as it will
for thousands of years
after I am gone.
– mrg
Apr 5, 2020
Apr 5, 2020 at 6:02 PM UTC
I keep looking for a light
at the end of this tunnel
And as it shrinks to the size of a
distant star by the day,
I am forced to face that I may
be in store for a longer walk home
than I thought
What is a virus,
but a force of nature?
Consider this a serendipitous
wrench thrown in the oiled
cogs of the fuming
Capitalist machine
Long have I dreamt of the day
the wheels would stop turning
Now it’s here, and I find myself
reeling like all the rest
from the whiplash of its
abrupt halt
The present overtaking me like
a sudden darkness my eyes must
adjust to, my mind grasping for
an end or a shape of it to rationalize
Aftershocks splitting the faulty
bedrock of society down the middle
A landslide of uprooted lives
crumbling into its hungry abyss
Residual dust pluming into the
doomsday sky as the last few
fingers of fading light vanish into
the coughing shadows.
– mrg
Mar 27, 2020
Mar 27, 2020 at 12:39 PM UTC
The first day of Spring
has me in a mood to
shake my remaining
winter blues
For months, the shutters
have been drawn tight
It’s passed time to crack
open a window and air
out my lingering stuffiness,
shed some natural light
in the corners of me where
darkness has settled
Sweep my mind clean of
the tired bones its been
chewing over
Scrub out the ring that has
formed around the tub from
my wallowing in self-
pity a little too long
Finally release all the
negativity, resentment,
comparison, and doubt I’ve
kept boxed up in my closet
And dust off the gratitude
I’ve been slacking on
practicing – break myself away
from the screen and out into
the bluebird day tugging on
my hair
Already I feel lighter, the
air somehow easier to breathe
I sense my internal scales
leveling again, the heaviness
lifting from my chest like
a melting snowdrift
A moon of many names is
rising tonight: crow,
sugar, worm
Its sign the same for all of us
returning to life beneath it
Who were sure we would
suffocate beneath another
year of our own dirt
Who, in our winter, have
denied our spring
She rouses within us now,
unoffended
Brings with her on the thawing
horizon an answer to our
prayers for a fresh start.
– mrg
Mar 13, 2020
Mar 13, 2020 at 12:33 PM UTC
Take a walk with me
through my soul, over
miles and miles of open land
Through the forests
brimming with honeysuckle
and songbirds
Along the jagged majesty of indigo
mountains jutting like saw teeth
from the pink-gummed horizon.
Do you see? How you color
the sky over it all?
Watch golden hour spill like a
molten avalanche across the valley –
sunset planting a rose in every shadow.
– mrg
Oct 20, 2019
Oct 20, 2019 at 5:29 PM UTC