Tan Lixin (b. 1993)
FEATURES / TRACK CHANGES
Keeping Skeletons, To A Friend
Written by Tan Lixin
Dated 30 Jul 2020
Keeping Skeletons
You are the writer
of children in decay,
your words, memories
of skeletons in the ground
the people in your stories are dead
but beauty stands before me
without blood or soil
and in my mind I have
pictures I have never seenI see the age in everyone
and I feed a fear
so teach me how to
twist the hands of time
and keep what will be lost.
The original piece was inspired by an autobiography that greatly disturbed me. I moved away from that in the revised piece and focused more on the notions of time and ageing.
Keeping skeletons
Time is a writer
of withered walls,
the home of children
in decay, skeletons
in the ground parched
like paper where its
words coalesce into
discoloured memories
standing before me;
bloodless bodies,
noiseless dialogue,
a silent movie playing
like déjà vu in daylight
that becomes a reminder
of the age in everyone,
as if I sought death
everywhere I looked:the curved back of a
cat caught in the pride
of its youth, the lines of a
weathered face planting
themselves on smooth
skin, storing time for
another day; a slice of
light falling softly on
a bowl of fruits placed
by someone already a
whole life ahead, the light
shifting by the hour until
the bowl is consumed by
dusk; my mother telling me
to pick out the fish bones
because her eyes cannot
guide her hands; my mother
talking about next time as if
next time is a distant home
on the moon, an unfinished
story shelved, the details of
a dream lost like a droplet
in the ocean. But mummy,
next time is already here.
I trace myself in her eyes
without time’s meddling craft,
hold her hands and imagine
when they could still wrap
around me like the shell of
an oyster, a pearl not yet
formed, safe from time’s
seduction, a parasitic
promise of grace.
I partially kept the images in stanza 1 of the original piece to introduce time is a taker of things and a creator of memories. In stanza 2 of the revised piece, I focused on the passing of time and ageing by building on the images of an aged cat, different faces of people, sunlight moving through the house and the persona's mother. Stanza 2 also expresses the persona's longing to return to their childhood. This is slightly different from stanza 2 of the original piece which simply expresses a desire to stop time, which seems pretty fantastical and idealistic to me now, almost 10 years after writing it.
*
Here is another poem.
To a friend
These were
wild days with
conversations about
foreign winter and
Cornwall in your photographs.You showed me a new world.
Our hearts were the same
in young dreams brokennow by loneliness as I
watch you leave for
pale summer light and
dreary mornings when
a letter will reach your
hands and you will read,Do you remember?
Here is the revised piece:
To a friend (just somebody, actually)
The days in 2008 were infatuated with
foreign winter, foreign boys, the act of
kissing. You asked if you were sick
for you didn’t know other girls who
kissed boys. You knew you weren’t
but you enjoyed my assurance and
awe that you lodged in your spine
so your head wouldn’t fall.
There were also the photographs of
Cornwall, handwritten notes in stolen
handwriting, stories penned in the
shelter of a curved hand, your anger
when you tried to read them and I said
no. You threw your shame on me so
nobody knew you were embarrassed,
teaching me to be sorry for my prose,
the slanted paragraphs, the way my
sentences ended like the lilt in my voice.Rinse, repeat.
The days in 2008 were a new world
you created for me. I thought we
belonged in my stories, but I was
your pet in a transparent cage.
You were writing my stories.In 2009, I bought a camera older than
your grandparent, one that had seen war
and lived in a hundred pairs of hands.
I wanted your hands to be its last home,
for you to capture the pale summer light
and the dreary mornings you craved and
smeared the tropics with. I wanted you to
capture where you thought you belonged,
your fair skin pretending to be ivory like the
bodies that occasionally oozed sideways to
make space for you as you fitted yourself,
a mismatched jigsaw piece.
But I saw a hint of hunger in your eyes,
thrilled at the prospect of an offering, a
promise you carved out of my words, an
imagined future of your status hoisted like
a flag, so I kept it from you. You lowered
your voice, heavy with disappointment, the
end of us spelled out clearly in every syllable
in your carefully chosen diction, a mask that
was finally slipping.I watched you leave, and dreamt of
my letter sitting on the table in your
new kitchen one colourless morning.
Do you remember? You don’t.
