[
Editor's note: This would be #2 in an ongoing series of writers who I want to be like.]
I've only read one thing that Nicholas Christopher has written.* And though I read this poem over 15 years ago, it remains one of the most powerful things that I've ever read.
*I Googled the guy for the hell of it, and sure enough, he's an incredibly prolific writer: 14 novels and countless other pieces.I'm not a great lover of poetry. Unless three of its five lines end with a word or phrase that rhymes with "Nantucket," I'm really not smart enough to get it.* But I've never been able to shake the imagery in this poem. It quite literally haunts me, to point where I actually spent a few hours at my parents' house rifling through old high school crap to find the photocopy that my 12th grade English teacher handed out, just so I could read it again.
*Incidentally, I was a poet for a brief period of time. In the summer of 1999. If you ever read my poetry, you'd understand why I gave it up. It was during this year that I also decided to wear ribbed turtleneck sweaters and glasses. Needless to say, 1999 was not a good year for me, both occupationally and aesthetically.I spent a long time thinking about why, and here's what I came up with:
I have an advanced sense of nostalgia (if that's at all meaningful), even for things that I never experienced.* It's the reason that I can name all four of the waitresses that were in the original cast of
It's a Living. It's the reason that I love a lot of music from the 1980s, even though a lot of it sucks. It's the reason that I get emotional when I watch
Rudy.
*Case in point: I was born in 1976, which means that the song "America," by Simon and Garfunkel, came out 10 years before I was born and a full 20-plus years before I'd even heard it. And still, it evokes such a passionate sense of nostalgia in me, of what it must have been like to be alive and young in that time, that I literally ache in my chest when I hear it.Anyway, the point is that this poem is a memory. One long gigantic memory of one magical night. And it's also the sadness of what happens when these little perfect moments of life are over. This happened and that happened, but no matter what, there was one night of perfection. One night where all that mattered was that they were there, in that moment. Fuck, right? What else do you need?
The point of this nonsensical, rambling post is that this poem is the reason that I wanted to become a writer. And if I ever capture it the way that Christopher captures it here, it'll be more than enough for me.
[Poem appears courtesy
The New Yorker, September 13, 1993]
The Quinero Sisters, 1968
by Nicholas Christopher
Against the flares of falling stars
over the man-made lake
in the middle of which we were reclining
on a creaking raft, they sang a wicked
duet of "Be My Baby," swaying and dipping
in their identical white bikinis,
snapping their wrists like The Ronettes.
The water dripping from their hair.
They were twins who were not identical.
Victoria's eyes a deep blue.
Virginia's a pale brown.
(A genetic marvel, as I knew
from my biology texts.)
Virginia was a soprano.
Victoria, with her husky whisper, a contralto.
In the moonlight, their faces shone.
Lips gleaming. Teeth flashing like silver.
To our left, in the deep darkness,
the waterfall roared; one night in June
a rowboat strayed over those falls
and two friends of ours were drowned,
their naked bodies, tightly embraced,
dredged up the next morning a mile downriver.
Now, on the last night of the summer,
we had come in a borrowed, baby-blue
convertible, driving fast along the mountain
roads, the high-beam lights picking up
the red eyes of animals crouched
in the grass--Victoria, Virginia,
her boyfriend, who was also named Nick,
and me, behind the wheel. The other Nick
was about to go to Vietnam, and I was
about to enter college, and side by side
on the raft we were passing a bottle
of red wine while the girls sang.
We were seventeen, except for Nick,
a carpenter's apprentice, who had turned
eighteen in July and been drafted in August.
And five months later, in a library in
Cambridge in dead of winter, I would see
his name listed among the dead in a newspaper--
killed in action outside of Da Nang.
But that night, under the sky riddled
with stars, with the wind licking our lips
and the water lapping softly beneath
the raft, he and I (two boys with the same
name) never took our eyes off the Quinero
sisters (twins who didn't even look
like sisters), revolving their open
palms in rhythmical circles, as if
they were trying to erase the night.
Oh, since the day I saw you,
I have been waiting for you,
You know I will adore you, till Eternity.They harmonized in and around the melody,
until, hands on hips and hair flying,
they threw their heads back and held
the last sweet note. And held it. For hours,
it seemed, while the moon slid through
the clouds, and the bats skimmed the water,
and the fish jumped, and then, reluctantly,
we left that raft, moored to the muddy lake
bottom, and two by two swam back to shore.
Virginia and Nick hurried up the hill,
and Victoria and I laid a blanket under
the trees, on the grass bank, and peeled off
our suits. Shuddering now, with the insects
buzzing around us like static, she opened
her arms and pulled me on top of her.
Ten years later, after two busted marriages,
her sister would open her wrists
and slip into a tub of blood-warm water.
And a year after that, to the day, Victoria
would be killed in a car crash, beside
a man she met at a party, who crossed
the double line into oncoming traffic
with a bottle cradled between his knees.
But when I held her tight that night,
breathing in the scent of her hair,
I felt her fingers dance along my spine
and her eyelashes moisten as she whispered
in my ear--I can hear it clearly--
her voice even then falling away from me,
"Be my baby now..."
Labels: writers who I want to be like, writing
