by Matthew Kilbane
Fears don’t disappear, as a rule.
Mine. Mine have always pried me or
seemed to, from the glue-trap of finitude
and so I’ve prized them—
my fear, for instance, of adults,
reasonless, deep-
seeped miscreant rip in the ego, ergo I wonder
what happens now in my 25th year
as I haltingly become one.
Fears don’t disappear—is there a law, some conservation
of grief? Until of late I imagined them
wholly converted to the passion I hurled
for years in one person’s direction. A young Levertov
wrote of familiar angels that were lately tears,
how we know them only fears transformed
and she convinced me. We are not always right
about what we think will save us —
those are your lines; I followed them
to that couch, that once, where I sat flooded
by a late summer shower musk
riding the blue of Sunday dusk through the screen
door of your living room—
as our Cleveland Browns recovered a fumble
on the flat screen, on mute—
where I might’ve been visibly shaking
as you, in red ink, trawled
my stack of poems. You pointed to this one
glum sonnet and asked
who the “you” was. I told you—of course, her—
and under the title, to clarify—
but as a nurse shouts clear!, or as a blade
is keen to clear a bone—you wrote
“for my lover”—you’re the kind of guy who says lover,
right? and before I could answer,
(and though, ,I was not)
Fuck yeah you are. Touchdown Browns.
The camera pans the ecstatic crowd:
a thousand open mouths
and their thousand vowels soundless and
seeking, as if feeling for
that difference, what last line there is,
between agony and awe—
but easing that silence
not at all.
Originally from Cleveland, OH and a graduate of Oberlin College and Purdue University’s MFA program, Matthew Kilbane is a PhD candidate at Cornell University. My poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal, DIAGRAM, the Best of the Net Anthology and elsewhere, and are the recipient of a Pushcart Prize nomination and Academy of American Poets Prize.
A-Minor 