‘What Returns’
— Nix Thérèse
Whenever I’m looking to sort through some issue of desire, I tend to turn to poems, and ‘What Returns’ didn’t disappoint. I love how direct and cheeky the first question is: “I pass my time // in a room that isn’t childhood, but / does that matter?” Here the speaker avoids the room that another version of themself inhabited, but questioning whether that distance matters highlights how they haven’t fully outgrown themself. You can avoid the space and still be closer than you’d like. Yet, this concept could also extend into the fantastic. If we reimagine our childhoods as large rooms that encapsulate our experience, it might be heartbreaking to step in and become re-accustomed to everything we left behind. Or maybe we desperately want to flip through everything and make sense of it. What’s weird about keeping a room just as you left it at a certain age is that you know it can’t hold everything. You know you took things out of it that can never be put back in, and kept things in that you’ll maybe never want or need again. Even if it all was intact, wouldn’t you eventually sort things into keep/destroy based on what you want/need now? This image feels so interesting to me in its seeming impossibility. We seldom leave spaces as they are because we ultimately find them lacking. Yet these lines make me question if reinventing what’s around us actually affects our insides or if it’s just to fool ourselves into thinking we’re better now, that our desires must be different.
The twist of the line breaks especially comes through here: “to not be a tongue in a glass jar / in an ocean.” To be devoid of any real taste is sad, but when enveloped by sea, just cruel. Even when we know we’ll encounter salt, the endless blueness of certain waters makes us want to drink, makes the thirst almost unbearable. The jar protects the tongue from the water that could never fully quench it, but it’s difficult to be surrounded by water (which here can be coded as pleasure) and not have a mouthful. Though it’s not described as such, I always see this tongue either rapidly sliding around in a pool its desire-spit or still at the bottom in its defeat. But sadly, action and inaction still result in separation, so the hopelessness is palpable.
Some of the ending lines continue to bring that lack of intimacy to the forefront: “I become a boy who touches / the back of strangers’ necks / in public— in love with the soft / of his own throat.” One thing I learned from the winters in Boston is that my neck is pretty much always warm, so there’s really never the shock of touching a cold body part and recoiling. It’s an inviting body part that we use to bring someone closer, especially when ours is the bait. This mirroring gives me a bit of a Narcissus vibe because the speaker’s in love with a softness that can be reflected in everything they desire. Sometimes finding that blink of commonality is all it takes to establish a connection. The entire poem spins on just how dangerous it can be to let desire spill, yet the more we’re filled up, the more conscious we are of ourselves, our bodies, our ways of moving through the world. The tongue swipes and settles for bittersweet.