John Deere Green

My old boyfriend graffitied a heart with Ro+Kate
on a train trestle when I was fifteen, and mornings

my mom would pretend not to notice as she drove
me past to school in that rickety station wagon couldn’t

keep the heat in. When I first saw it, I assumed it wasn’t
for me. That was bout the time I was mucking to afford

riding lessons, my thighs growing thick beneath denim
and leather, and loving what I wrapped them around.

Some days, I’d be brushing down a horse and the turn
of a pigeon’s wing was all the god dust the stalls needed

for a haunting, and Reba coiling through the mess
of stirrups and laces and nothing was glass and everything

was oiled and lasted. I think it was some humid afternoon
when I had Jerry tethered, a grey with a long face and sad

lead, Charlie manning the tractor, and me, just brushing and
smoothing and loving this other body, then Joe Diffie came

on and that paint on concrete beneath a freight line said John
Deere Green/ on a hot summer night/he wrote “Billy Bob Loves Charlene”/

in letters three foot high/ and the whole town said the fool shoulda used red/
but it looked good to Charlene… we all had human names, and didn’t

have much else, not even enough past to remember. Only then.
A quarter century ago, the dirt and hair was billowing off his

gnarled body and it was sticking to the sweat running down my face,
and today, I haven’t touched a horse in years but when my lover

tells me John Deere board members voted to retain their diversity
standards, Diffie floats on back like the Malachite drifting its course

into the bright Crotons that were planted very nicely but just don’t
look right. The getting place is chambers of grief you’ve locked away,

and boy, do I miss that boy for all he might well’ve been, a spray-painted
wall dripping black, and a boy in love running into the night, while over

his shoulder, cicadas are just starting to sing.