My Daughter Asks, When Will You Return ?
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Some questions a girl asks to hear the sound of her own voice lilting into a distant field so she remembers, through the course of daily tasks she is alive. She is alive as she watches the eggs turned over easily onto the yoke's belly, alive when she rises from the trace of herself left behind in sheets, full of blood rush when she takes the stairs, head low, each foot an alternating promise she locks her eyes into. Some questions my daughter asks to hear her voice resound, quiver deep in the throat with cello resonance, to soothe the solitude of her inner body, shatter the pervasive silence bound to bone by ligament and tendon. And also there is completion, an aching absence of resolve that threads her thin belief, cinches the things she knows, needs to know, through the deep recessed sound of you.
Ruth Ellen Kocher, an assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, Missouri, is author of three collections of poetry, Desdemona's Fire (Lotus Press, 1999), When the Moon Knows You're Wandering (New Issues, University of Western Michigan, 2002), and One Girl Babylon (New Issues, University of Western Michigan, 2003).
