‘Adolescence-II’
— Nix Thérèse
If you asked me what one of the first poems that made me want to study poetry was, ‘Adolescence-II’ immediately comes to mind because it manages to capture the feeling of fear of one’s body without explicitly giving it away. The sense of anticipation is captured in the pacing, even from the first line—“although it is night, I sit in the bathroom, waiting.” We can instantly tell that whatever the speaker is waiting on has already taken them outside of their normal schedule and leads us to wonder what is worth this shift in time and mood. When they say, the baby-breasts are “alert”, it implies a sense of detachment from their body because the baby-breasts aren’t said to be theirs, but described as if they are just there. The speaker hasn’t fully grown into ownership of their body (yet?) and this distance also makes it harder for us to fully inhabit their body too, creating a dual block.
The action picks up in the second stanza: “then they come, the three seal men with eyes as round / as dinner plates and eyelashes like sharpened tines.” This leap into the seemingly absurd had me arrested. Clearly their body types (which feel cartoon villain-like) don't match, so would their discussion have any impact on the speaker’s life? It seems yes, because when they whisper “can you feel it yet?”, the speaker feels embarrassed in being unable to answer them in a suitable way. It’s frustrating to feel as if others know more about you than you do yourself. The gaze continually discounts you instead of inviting you into the conversation. There’s no back and forth with the seal men because there can’t be: they value holding this knowledge over the speaker’s head, instead of having a mutual relationship. They are terrifying in their lack of real concern for how their visits affect the speaker’s reality. In this way, we can see that the speaker’s POV is actually pretty limited: ironically, she can only experience, not understand.
When the speaker says, “I clutch at the ragged holes / they leave behind”, I always flinch because we probably all know what it’s like to try to hold onto something that doesn’t want to be held. That sense of being unable to grasp is something that permeates the whole poem. And who can forget an ending like “night rests like a ball of fur on my tongue”? This feeling of having parts of yourself unknown is indigestible, unable to nourish or positively contribute. It may be light in nature, but it’s still a burden. The sense of ritual throughout the poem implies that this cycle will continue until the speaker finally has the knowledge these men have, and it feels cruel of them to repeatedly dangle it, but not hand it over. Sometimes power is just not having to answer to anyone, and I wish it on the speaker every time I come back to this space.