Lisa Kelly

signing the seasons

i.
Shrivelled, black, frozen
in a bone-dry winter. Thawed
in this month of floods,

jelly ear fungus
no longer a dead ear. I
touch the velvet-soft

resurrection — same
texture as my left lobe. Rain
falls on the ash stump,

fingers sprout for spring.

ii.
Museum aircon
dries our sweat. The signer leads
us to Rake’s Progress,

celadon vases
reflecting Hogarth’s paintings,
descent from riches

to Bedlam to death —
Kintsugi, rivets of gold,
memory vessels.

I watch his cool palms.

iii.
In the middle of
the washing up, I found my
arms up to elbows

in suds. A cat looked
asleep on tarmac — one eye
a burst popper on

thin red thread. Deafness
is not deference. Frost moon
pinched to a crescent

with finger and thumb.

iv.
’I saw eight deer cross
a snowy field’ you messaged
from coach H behind

my coach G. I too
had seen them, a split second
earlier I guess

had failed to count or
note ‘they crossed in formation’
but I saw antlers

like deaf hands clapping.

Yellow Roses and the Bridge

 i. Yellow Roses
The yellow roses are taped to the bridge
I run over the bridge
Five times I run over the bridge
Running doesn’t allow taking in much about the yellow roses on the bridge
But why are there yellow roses taped to the bridge?
There’s a gap in my mind I try to bridge
Did someone jump from the bridge?
Did someone propose to someone on the bridge?
Did someone throw ashes into the water from the bridge?
There’s also a message taped to the yellow roses taped to the bridge
There’s no time to read the message as I run over the bridge
Should I stop on the bridge?
Should I take time to count the number of yellow roses on the bridge?
What more will I notice, if I slow down, about the yellow roses on the bridge?
What will I discover if I read the message taped to the yellow roses taped to the bridge?
Sign language is a visual language and the yellow roses are a sign on the bridge
I sign YELLOW by stroking the Y between forefinger and thumb as I run over the bridge
I sign ROSE pinching forefinger and thumb under my nose as I run over the bridge
Audio reaction time is faster than visual reaction time as I run over the bridge
Fingers draw a thread of silence as I run over the bridge

ii. The Bridge
Stop on the bridge and count 15 yellow roses
Stop on the bridge and find it’s twine, not tape, securing the yellow roses
Stop on the bridge and see the grey and white striped cellophane holding the yellow roses
Stop on the bridge and read the poem taped to the yellow roses
Stop on the bridge and watch the yellow water reflecting the yellow roses

iii. Throughout the Year I Think of You and Once in a While I Cry
Running over the bridge in a circuit thinking of yellow roses throughout,
the 15 stems in grey and white cellophane, tied to the bridge with twine, the
petals browning, wondering why they’re here this later-flowering time of year —
Who jumped? Whose ashes were scattered? A few details only revealed when I
stop on the bridge, really see the yellow roses, read the attached poem, think
how observation is an observance, how yellow roses are a symbol of
enduring love, and how a symbol is close to a sign, as I is close to you,
until we no longer holds, and there are just odourless yellow roses. Speed and
rhythm of sign language are slower than speed and rhythm of speech, but once
you realise the rhythm of running over the bridge is a rhythm only in
time with itself, it’s time to break the circuit, stop again on the bridge, draw a
thread of silence, sign YELLOW, stroke the crease between fingers, while
running it’s the colour of the water, sign ROSES reflected in the water — I
pinch finger and thumb under my nose. Sometimes a scent makes you cry.

my g

(sound of someone signing your name with uppercase g)

let the lower case enter lightly into conversation, refer to the deity of you,
the polytheistic pervasiveness of you, how you fill an open space, blow
dust into my eyes, so when i look at branches dance in the ease of your
breeziness, they are hazy with the rhythm of your all-encompassing arms,
able to perform many actions simultaneously, a slug of hennessey,
spinning the vinyl, switching between turntables, waving to worshippers
who thrum and pulse as one entity to the sound you create which is an idea
of sound that resonates in the echo chamber of our bodies as we search
for you not in the senselessness of semantics, shades of meaning
between the deaf you and the death of you, in that diagnosis of a dead
ear, nor can we accept synonyms of agnostic, heathen, idolatrous,
because we are having that conversation again, the one about hierarchy
and belonging, about identity and culture, about medical and hard of,
about gain and loss, and i am saying sorry for not hearing everything,
and i am saying sorry for hearing something, and in the betweenness i
fall in, i know the upper case is the capital of culture for believers because
demarcation is difference, but what if there were no division, if it all just
blurred — the sounds you mix with the shapes we make, how my g, you
welcome us all — the signers, the cyborgs, the silent, the single-sided sisters
who hug the walls and make flowers of themselves — my g, you would not
let them wilt, you would not let them weep in the gap between lower case
g & d, because my g, you know there is an ‘o’, an open space where we dance
lift arms like drunken branches in the breeze that reach up to the wet sky
of you and watch fractal patterns hold us all divine in your presence

DOT-TO-DOT

after Yayoi Kusama

With one polka dot stand up to
the world, dissolve into the O
of the cosmos, its asylum
faces like little dots or moons
chewing on their own reflections
in Infinity Mirror Rooms
where self is obliterated
and the brilliance of life, endless

O dotterel descending on
deaf women signing in the queue
spotted in the dot-to-dot line
of faces — hands cupping planets
fingers flicking stars into space —
rounded on by a flapping fool
for rejoining the dots to be
refilled by the brilliance of life

Infinity, the number eight
horizontal, two dots linked like
two deaf women, a lemniscate
sign of boundlessness against ‘O
no’, yet more misunderstanding
but some bold dots, decorated
in ribbons, shooed the dotterel
twittering, ‘Stop signing at me!’

Forefinger points infinity,
the way to space with curved thumb cocked —
O middle, ring and little, let
yourselves fly free, feel for the front
of the queue, experience life
in mirrored rooms where dots of light
reds, blues, greens flash the mystery
of each interconnected dot

Changing sequence of lights, walkway
of water in the oil of night
careful not to slip — hands held out
shimmering mirrors, skin surface
sinking into oblivion,
absolved of definition, O
Fortuna, like the moon waxes
wanes, plays with mental clarity

Two deaf women treated like dumb
insignificant dots for their
signing, their incomprehension
ballooning into gasped panic —
O Chandelier of Grief, beauty
and sadness at the same time, on-
lookers fought to allot more than
two minutes of infinity

Spinning snowflakes of crystal light
appearing the same, each unique
magnified in mirrors of eyes
try to spy blue in beautiful —
signing is a visual language
watch dots engulfing dot-to-dots
our osmosis of vision, crowd
of dots blur into brilliance, O

cut free from finite boundaries
raise fists in revolt — psychosis
in a cohesion of dots — peep
into holeways to heaven
vertigo as a state of mind
obliterated for looking
O so outside the wounded world —
with one polka dot you stood up

Lisa Kelly's second collection, The House of the Interpreter (Carcanet), is a Poetry Book Society Summer Recommendation. Her first collection, A Map Towards Fluency (Carcanet), was shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize 2021. She has single-sided deafness and co-edited What Meets the Eye (Arachne Press). She was shortlisted for the 2024 Forward Prizes for Best Single Poem — Written for her poem, ‘I wanted to show you a donkey in the field or I want to show you the donkey in a field’.

Lisa wrote the following about her poems:

I often think about my single-sided deafness – not just from the point of view of being able to hear, and where to position myself, but from an aesthetic angle. I like the way it shapes my appreciation of the world and my visual focus. Since learning British Sign Language (BSL), I have been seeking out exhibitions with Deaf-led guided tours. John Wilson has a phenomenal arts knowledge and BSL skills, and his tour at the Sir John Soane’s Museum for a ceramics display in response to Hogarth’s ‘A Rake’s Progress’ inspired the second stanza of ‘Signing the Seasons’. It was a hot summer’s day, and I had the idea to create a seasonal series based on other observations of signing and signs in nature and art. I keep a journal and so I looked at previous entries to find the experiences that would create the sense of a year passing.

At one time I was seriously considering embarking on a PhD around investigating nature and eco-poetics through sign language. I might come back to it, but just haven’t had the time recently. The ‘Yellow Roses and the Bridge’ sequence reflects a preoccupation that looking for signs in nature is a way of slowing down time because of the level of intense observation. Running is often about speed and just getting through, but during a circuit where I passed over a bridge several times, where yellow roses were tied to the rails, I tried to meditate on what this meant to me and what they might have meant to the person who left them tied to the bridge. The final golden shovel is based on one of the lines in the card’s poem attached to the roses.

‘my g’ is a very personal poem that is a response to an aspect of D/deaf politics that was playing on my mind. I feel I don’t fit into the hearing or the deaf world and although it can be a generative and creative space, there are times I find it challenging. In simple terms, if you are Deaf with a capital D, you identify as culturally Deaf; and if you are deaf with a lower- case d, you see deafness as a medical condition. Of course, it is much more complex than this and there is a certain flow between the two identities, but in this poem, I imagine a place, a kind of paradise, where there is complete acceptance of all types of D/deafness – a sort of spiritual party.

‘DOT-TO-DOT’ has an intense focus on form and was written after visiting Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms exhibition at Tate Modern with all its mirrors and lights. I read about how two deaf people were in the queue waiting for entry and were told to stop signing by a member of staff. The form is a way of paying respect to Kusama, who is a brilliant artist and a maverick, and also of channelling my anger about how sign language can be seen as ‘other’ and misunderstood. It is a poem against mundanity and easy assumptions, and for diversity.