If I live longer
A. Lydick
(c) 2007

I promise to cross your ankles
For comfort, before you’re buried
If somehow I don’t ensure cremation
Which is what you actually want
Then I’ll at least be sure to get this right

If it goes down that way
I’m guessing it could be a hot mess
A battle over who best knew you
I’ll concede before it comes to that
Thinking you’d find it a waste of time

Anyway, how sweet and silly
How perfect it would be
Sneaking to comfort you, tuck you in
Laughing, remembering your sleepy face
“If that happens, promise me you’ll cross my ankles.”




Later that same life
A. Lydick
(c) 2007

On the last day of my life
I will wake up at 6:33 a.m.
Go eat $1.95 eggs and toast
In some Sandhills cafe

Later, stand next to the Niobrara
In the heat of the day
Let my neck get red-brown and warm

Of course drink cold beer
Lean back against the top porch step
In the openness of early evening
Elbows resting on smooth and gray

Alone
Even the dog will have died
Not lonely
Just thinking of you

Precipice
by A. Lydick
(c) 2006


A little ditty about Jack and Diane
Two American kids growin’ up in the heartland
Jackie's gonna be, oh, a football star
Diane's debutante, backseat of Jackie's car

I was thirteen. She was thirty-two. Now that I’m just shy of that age myself, I can see how she wore it. She was inviting but wrapped up tight and able to slice clean though anything that got too close – barbed wire, no longer shining and cold but rusted brown from the elements of Nebraska work and weather and hard hands twisting her past the stress point. Still she held. She might even now, but I can’t speak to that, having abandoned her and others who helped steer me then. All I know now are her lessons from back in the quiet 4:30 a.m. of that kitchen and the late night noise of that stinking bar. She was thirty-two. I was thirteen.

I used to wonder while she talked whether I was meant to be her (needed to be her), wanted to touch her, or just plain fucking pitied her. I never stopped asking the question really, just drifted down other muddy rivers until one day I’d realized it wasn’t the right question at all. She’d say her stories, clothes cut just low or high enough to show me the important marks – never preaching but getting her message across all the same. Here’s how to keep it, stay hot and wanted and in control in places full of drunks and anger and rough but slow men, warm but biting women. Here’s how to build it, get wise and tough but not mean and hard when the only things to let you know you’re a man are the dick between your legs and the bloody dirt on your hands. Here’s how to be a girly girl…here’s how to be a man…and hold, and not lose yourself, live, and maybe even feel something good and warm once in awhile.

She’d show me her stories, clothes just on or off enough to let me see how it worked – never preaching but getting her message across all the same. She didn’t give me the answer – might even have known that the question wasn’t ever quite gonna fit.

Suckin’ on a chili dog outside the Tastee Freeze
Diane’s sittin’ on Jackie’s lap
Got his hands between her knees
Jackie say, “Hey Diane let’s run off
behind the shady trees.
Dribble off those Bobby Brooks,
and let me do what I please.

Running down that gravel road, I must have listened to that tape a hundred times that summer. I hated the headphones sliding down the back of my neck with the sweat – wished I could have had the time, my only time, just for quiet, just to think, but I needed something to drive the counting out of my head. That was my third summer at AgriPro, and we’d been roguing longer than usual already – walking nine hours every day in the dust or mud, weeding out enough weaklings (and even some strong ones) to make fields of hundreds of perfect short rows of twenty-seven or thirty-two or fifty baby corn plants.

That particular Sunday, we had off. When we had off, I always preferred to do one of my two daily runs in the ninety-five-plus late June mid-day heat – figuring that that much more sweat meant that much less of me, but never able to resolve whether I was liking the tits looking bigger or the hips looking smaller on my skinny frame. I never stopped asking the question really, just ran off down enough roads until one day I’d realized it wasn’t the right question at all. That day, though, in that heat, I was flying – feeling the sun and the three million rocks under my shoes, sucking in the humid breath of the fields and squinting into the blue-white brightness of the 1:30 p.m. sky. I felt his pick-up coming even before I saw the dust kick up from beyond the bend.

Exactly my Dad’s age, he’s a bigger guy, Irish and always red in the face. That summer, he still drove that old red Chevy, and I hadn’t yet wondered whether my Dad and his wife might be sleeping together. He and his wife sold all the Burt County farmers crop insurance, him mostly helping when he wasn’t in the field himself. I had envied his oldest daughter her boyfriend, caught catfish out of his boat a coupla times, and would teach his next-to youngest boy to water ski behind my Dad’s Crestliner in the Missouri River later that same summer. He started slowing down as soon as he saw me, pulling off from the center of the road and grinding through the long mountains of gravel built up down the middle and on the side. His timing was perfect – not surprising given that he drives those roads every day of his damn life – and I pulled up my run just as he put it in park.

I noticed right away, but I kept walking – across the first gravel mountain range, the first bare track, the center pile, the second track – finally sticking my shoes just feet from his front tire in the gravel on his side of the road, resting my arms on the sill of the open window of his pick-up and my bare stomach against the nearly too hot steel of the door.

He just looked. As we talked – about last week’s rain, about when they’d likely be leaving for the Ozarks that year and how Dad would be checking his sprinklers while they were gone, about how Crystal was doing with her new husband – he just looked. I could feel him wanting his tongue on the tits sweating through my sports bra and his hand down my shorts to loosen up that damp pussy. It’s funny, really, how I didn’t see it coming and how, even in the moment, I didn’t know which of us I was. I wanted to reach in the pick-up window, grab the back of his head, and slam his big fucking face down into the steering wheel over and over. I wanted to reach in over that rolled down window, unbutton his too-tight jeans and look him right in the eye while I beat his cock until he came all over himself like the pitiful fuck he was. I wanted to open the door to my pick-up, grab me, lay me face down across that dusty bench seat, and fuck me from behind with those shorts shoved just barely down my thighs. I could feel it. I was looking down at the sweat running over the tanline above my ass. I could see some of last year’s corn, a Hostess pie wrapper, and an empty can of Skoal on the floor of the passenger’s side from where my head lay on the seat. I could taste the sixteen years of dust in that pick-up. We just looked.

Gonna let it rock
Let it roll
Let the Bible Belt come and
save my soul
Hold on to 16 as long as you can
Changes come around real soon
make us women and men

I was standing on the precipice of a question that was never the right question at all. I come from a place where many things – smart and dumb, green and dying, woman and man, home and gone, whore and lover, the fucker and the fucked – just aren’t that simple, whether the people who steered me through them then thought they were…or not.

I jump, and still stand solidly there, where I feel these three million stories beneath my feet and smile.

Oh yeah, they say life goes on
Long after the thrill of livin' is gone

"You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two."

Larry McMurtry