It sits in a flimsy pie-tin of crimped and corrugated silver,
wrapped in a paper towel my daughter wets three times
a day. My son tells her to chop it, one eye per chunk,
bury it in the yard, then dig it up. But she’s like me,
needs to see it grow. It’s an Idaho potato, nothing special,
useful under the right cut of meat in the crockpot. It withers
in toward its center, wrinkling a bit, like me, color
sucked from my hair’s roots by—I don’t know—this—
arguing—over why potato eyes are called eyes when
they’re seeds: Put down the knife. Leave her project
be. She’s not sure she wants it now, like the time
I saw my 12-string guitar in the hands of the mover
my husband hired—My lucky day, he said and smiled,
my husband right behind chirping, She never plays it, take it
away. What do they know of the grad school hours,
the ways it saved me from myself, useless in a house
of crying babies—I see, with my blind potato eyes I see
and from behind them I dream of guitars washing up,
like parts of me, like plastic shovels of the hotel tourists,
reds, blues, mostly primary yellows, days’ children
long gone, sandpipers taking back the shore.
We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store
and the gas station and the green market and
Hurry up honey, I say, hurry,
as she runs along two or three steps behind me
her blue jacket unzipped and her socks rolled down.
Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave?
To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown?
Today, when all the errands are finally done, I say to her,
Honey I’m sorry I keep saying Hurry—
you walk ahead of me. You be the mother.
And, Hurry up, she says, over her shoulder, looking
back at me, laughing. Hurry up now darling, she says,
hurry, hurry, taking the house keys from my hands.
You notice blue
bonnets blooming
on Texas highways,
blue hues in birds
not normally blue
but black and blue
like grackles’ heads,
old ladies with blue hair
not on black, but white
the tint a rinse gone awry,
a bad dye job like the time
you pulled up in the garage
not one, not two, not three
but four hours late,
your hair orange. You
said it looked better than
before first glance
of green, you’d seen a horror
movie: Frankenstein. Oh, how
you’d die if social climbers
disclosed ungodly sheens
not once, not twice, but three
times red and gray
gone green
gone yellow
gone orange
flecks of thread in blue
couch where we’d sit
and chat, just the two of us,
over coffee and blueberry scones.
—Laurie Kolp, from Hello, It’s Your Mother, Finishing Line Press
At fifteen, I drew stick figures
of my parents and me,
without flesh or feature,
quick, sexless.
Dissatisfied, I turned my pencil aslant
adding a tipped smile,
breasts and fingernails.
Knowing the tricks of the graphite then
I saw how easy it was to cause
and not analyze.
I could add apples to a tree’s branches
whether it had foliage or not,
and a peach tree could bear plums.
My drawings of my children are dimpled.
They shine like glazed paper.
This one of my son seems overpopulated,
so I will erase the brain that bedevils him
with pleated thoughts shuffling
like poker cards.
If I rub the eraser across my daughter’s heart
she’ll make her way like a straight-eyed
comet, leaving a wake of hunger.
Here is the landscape of my son,
prying open the horizon with his grin;
of my daughter, trying to crack the sun
with her large laughter.
What of the clock that clucks, “No, no, no”?
They’ve flushed it down the commode
with all the toilet-training paraphernalia
until it backs up in the pipes,
bulges beautifully into the hills
that belch so early, “Hello, hello, good morning.”
Of course, we must answer,
must gather up the dew and daffodils
in our nightshirts, comb our hair through
with the larks’ incessant trill,
our two small ones trailing after us
into the wonderfully, brightening world.
It was horrible but it wasn’t all horrible.
—Cecilia Woloch
Afterward, it was the satisfaction of paying a debt, except
she wasn’t one of those mothers who made us feel
as if we owed her for childbirth and raising us.
It was knowing I didn’t shirk changing the colostomy bag
or dressing the disfigured zipper of staples that closed
her wound, breastbone to groin.
Once I woke to a midnight crash: her with a halo of blood
on the bathroom floor.
It was knowing I could love like that.
Mealtimes, she would frown, push away child’s portions
no matter what recipe I tried, except the marijuana-pill night
when at 10 p.m. she asked me to bake a cake,
and I called my sister: Mum has the munchies!
Chemo shrank her into a stooped monk in a hooded robe.
Strands of fine hair littered her pillow
until it was time to shop for a wig.
I tried on some too. We laughed when I looked worse than she did.
She sprang for the expensive one, nicknamed it Dixie,
felt almost pretty.
And she recovered: her sweetness, generosity,
pain-in-the-ass-ness, even her hair for seven years.
Then it was hearing cancer again from the doctor
who didn’t want to say it, and me expelling the word
like a magician pulling a grenade from my mouth.
I hoped hospice spoke the truth, that it was okay not to feed her,
that her mostly closed eyes, the rambling words
meant she was processing what she needed to: memories,
reconciliations, the willingness to go.
Then, it was knowing she had checked off her final item
when my brother arrived, recovered from his own cancer,
and she woke for a last moment to say his name, Philip.
Outside, the Maple seeds turn as they fall,
turn in complex spirals from their branches.
Sleep, baby, as I rock, as the Maple sways
in the gusts of air, shaking loose its twirling birds.
I have been you, wrapped warm near a forgotten pane,
seasons rushing, now it seems, through dresses, shoes,
cap and veil, the leaves rolling behind my eyes,
over Fall lawns, then buried under flawless snows.
What shapes and sound conspire to bring you dreams,
before you discover the scattering force of the world.
There will be a morning when you rise and find a road away
from me, my love left pressed like Maple leaves in a book.
Years will pass in pages I write to keep you
in my heart; the years will turn in orbits near and far.
For now, by this window, I hold you, your touch
like the small fingers of the rain—beyond us,
the leaves, and the indifferent arms of the wind.
KELLĒ SAUER is a photographic artist who has a very special vision and poetic touch.
If you are looking for a special anniversary, birthday, or Valentine’s gift for your guy, or a chance to create beautiful keepsakes for your children, KELLĒ might just be your photographer of choice. (Yes, she will travel for you.)
KELLĒ is also available for weddings, to capture the heart of the experience in images so beautiful they’ll take your breath away.
I hope you enjoy this interview, that shares her heart and thoughtfulness—and I hope you find inspiration in it for your own life.
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L.L.:
I’ve had the pleasure and the privilege of being there almost from the beginning—at least online—of your photography journey. I’ve watched you grow and explore and, always, do beautiful work, even as your style has changed. In my deepest heart, I hope that someday your latest work will grace the walls of a museum, or ten!
Speaking of beginnings, I’d like to hear about yours a little. Who gave you your first camera—or did you purchase it yourself? Were you just exploring, or did you dream forward even at the start? I mean, wow, did you ever think you’d take your camera to Italy and do a shoot like the one featured in this interview?
KELLĒ:
I wouldn’t be who I am without you, Laura, and my photography certainly wouldn’t be where it is if you hadn’t been there for my online beginnings.
My photography beginnings came before I ever held a camera. My earliest memories come to me in pictures: lamplight, sunsets, starlight overhead on a wheelbarrow ride, rainbow plastic balloons on my bedside lamp, the slit incandescent lamplight on my floor after I’d been tucked in at night, moonlight on snow lighting a ballerina-wallpapered bedroom. I think I was making pictures before I knew my words, but I didn’t know how to speak my “native tongue” until I was about twelve years old, when my dad gifted me a little blue 35mm camera for Christmas. My first photo captured a frost that iced the fence he’d built around our Illinois farmhouse to keep my mother’s goats in.
Because money was tight in our family of ten and film was an unnecessary expense, I wasn’t to gain an opportunity to develop my work until college, when I was able to secure funds for a “real camera,” a Single Lens Reflex camera that had an automatic mode that let me point and shoot the thing with a nice lens. I began photographing my friends. The light. The campus. Anything around me that caught my eye. And then I would develop the photos and ask anyone and everyone if they were any good.
My goals in college were small, and largely successful. Some of my images are still featured in the college’s print and marketing media. I never dreamed then that I would one day be photographing weddings or traveling around the world with my camera.
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L.L.:
When I first knew you, your photography was all about light. It was your signature. Yet, over time, I remember asking you if you’d consider working a bit more with darker hues. And now, to my great surprise and delight, you are. How is light still a part of your work? What has led you to do almost chiaroscuro work, in a painterly style?
KELLĒ:
I think light is still my signature. And I don’t shoot dark for the sake of shooting dark, like many photographers dabbling in chiaroscuro. As I have developed as an artist and as a human with intense periods of depression, my eye and my heart have been drawn almost metaphorically to the light entering into the darkness, to the warmth and safety of the rose-gold in the gray, but it wasn’t until the last six months or so that I (as a fully self-taught photographer) finally figured out that 1) all of my favorite photos from anyone had this quality of light within the darkness, and 2) I could actually leave behind an aesthetic I didn’t prefer anymore and try one that I did.
L.L.:
Your work is deeply poetic. Like the best poems, which contain vision and focus, your work speaks past thought and straight to the heart. How has poetry been a part of your photography journey, if at all?
KELLĒ:
I love to write and to speak and to converse, but sometimes I think my pictures may simply be the shorthand for my poetry, an easier way of communicating the feelings I am always trying to express. I often use my own images as placeholders for words I will write later, perhaps in another season, when I am able to articulate something more thoroughly.
T.S. Poetry author Maureen Doallas has called me a “poet-photographer,” and it’s a moniker that has stuck with me. My photos flow from my words and my words flow from my photos. As I mentioned above, it is a language, one worth a thousand words, and one worth a thousand pictures. I live in between. My photography clients tell me that sessions with me are like therapy sessions, because as I shoot, I speak to them the beauty that I am seeing in them, in the world around us, in the way they are, and the way they are with me.
Poetry taught me that not everything has to make sense. Just as a poem sometimes speaks in phrases that communicate an overall feeling at the end of it, a perfectly composed picture may not be as powerful as a photo that lets the light and the dark sway and flow and communicate with one another throughout the frame. Poetry allowed me to be an artist with my camera, where photography classes about technology and composition would simply have drained the life from me.
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L.L.:
You’re a mom, several times over. Do you believe you’d be the photographer you are had you not had children? How does having kids currently affect your work, whether thematically or just in terms of actually getting the work done?
KELLĒ:
No. Being a mother pushed me through doors I never would have opened if I had never had children. I have a pragmatic streak that would have kept me working in an office for financial security for the rest of my born days.
After my oldest daughter was born, I experienced two years of postpartum depression that left me physically unable to register the sunlight. I realized when she was about three months old that I could still see it in my pictures of her, so I shot and I shot and I shot and I shot, because not only could I not remember the sunlight, I couldn’t remember the days. I couldn’t remember my baby. But when I looked at the world through my lens, and again in my computer as I processed, the darkness often moved away. I found I could remember life that happened if I could remember what photo I took on that day.
Now, my children simply push me out of my natural introversion every single day. I am almost never alone, even when I am depressed, and as I watch their lives expand, I am learning to expand my own, to open my heart further, to reach out with kindness to others with whom I would like to work. I believe that my own growth as a person and as an artist will challenge them to reach higher themselves as they grow older. My work in photography has also given them a picture of womanhood that I did not receive from a mother whose gift was in nurture and homemaking.
It is always a challenge to get my work done. I am careful to set my clients’ expectations around my actual timelines with school runs and sick days. The hardest parts for me are balancing my emotional energy between my art and my children, especially as they have grown older and asked me for more. “Done” is often a moving target, but it’s also a beautiful challenge to train my own free spirit to learn the beauty of the ritual we all need.
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L.L.:
Do you have a favorite poet? How about a favorite poem? I’d love to hear. Along these lines, have you ever thought of doing “poem shoots” sort of the way you seem to be doing “painter shoots” (I love how some of your work is channeling Vermeer these days!)?
KELLĒ:
That is not an easy question to answer. Mary Oliver is probably my favorite poet, followed closely by Christina Rosetti. Both poets speak profoundly of loss and of finding life within their loss, themes that resonate deeply with my own language of feeling. Another favorite is David Whyte, whose prose in his book, Consolations, has been a bit of a lifeline this last year as I have been deepening further after a cross-country move that broke my heart and turned my world upside down. My current favorite poem is one of his, a poem called “Stone.”
Stone (Thobar Phádraig)
by David Whyte
The face in the stone is a mirror looking into you.
You have gazed into the moving waters,
you have seen the slow light, in the sky
above Lough Inagh, beneath you, streams have flowed,
and rivers of earth have moved beneath your feet,
but you have never looked into the immovability
of stone like this, the way it holds you, gives you
not a way forward but a doorway in, staunches
your need to leave, becomes faithful by going nowhere,
something that wants you to stay here and look back,
be weathered by what comes to you, like the way you too
have travelled from so far away to be here, once reluctant
and now as solid and as here and as willing
to be touched as everything you have found.
I have been staring at this poem for a year, slowly memorizing it with my entire being, feeling my life flashing before my eyes as I face an immovable God and reality that does not change to suit my whims. I feel I am just beginning to understand the strength I have gained through my losses and the intense changes I have experienced over extended periods of grief and depression. The invitation in David’s words to embrace the things I cannot change, and to be willing to let reality break against me has offered me a new perspective on loss and on showing up for my life and the beauty to be found – both in my daily life and within myself – even if I can’t dictate my reality.
And you’d better believe I have been thinking of shoots built around poems. This is actually one of my soft personal photography prompts for 2019. I have this little book by L.L. Barkat about love that I want to linger on.
L.L.:
Aw, thanks. 🙂 As an artist and a mom, is there anything else you’d really like to share with our Moms on Poetry readers? Some kind of encouragement or advice, a story or an observation, or even a favorite quote? Or something else altogether?
KELLĒ:
As mothers, I think we always have this idea of how we should be, how we should mother, how we should sacrifice, how our kids should turn out, how we should be feeling about anything and everything. But beginning both my motherhood and my artist journey at the same time through a haze of intense depression gave me a different perspective.
Because of my physical limitations, I didn’t have the luxury of “doing it all” after my first baby was born. I could only do things that I had energy to do, and for me that meant choosing my happy places. Creating meals. Playing with colors and design. Sitting in the light. Taking pictures. I learned what my gifts were instead of my responsibilities. I learned my own language even as my children learned theirs.
As I emerged from the fog of those first depressed years with a new lifestyle I hadn’t quite meant to create, I realized that where my mother’s gift and example to me had been nurture, my own gift is and example to my children is seeing people. The more I develop that gift, the more I am able to see my children and to provide in my own way for them both physically and emotionally.
We weren’t all made to be the same mother or to produce children who would be the same as other children. I am the mother my children were meant to have, and they expect me to be me, not some idea of a mother that they need. Living into my gifts has been the best gift I could have given them, and my favorite vision for our future is bringing them into it all with me as they develop their own gifts.
L.L.:
Thanks so much, Kellē. I’m deeply appreciative that I’ve had the chance to follow your work for so long. And I look forward watching where your art continues to take you—and, well, where you continue to take it. ☺
