silere

by John Tessitore

There must be a science

of dreadful ambience.

In movies it is “presence,”

room tone, the distinct 

acoustics of place. For example,

we never experience silence

but the hush of air down dark

halls, through closed windows.

For example, we now know

there is no vacuum of space.

Even our bodies are unquiet,

all crackling joints and tinnitus.

But self is not the same 

as the white noise of loneliness

which is the shudder of time

like a room full of whispers,

a subtle inuendo, the sound 

of sound and song of mere

existence, of being without 

substance, primordial vacancy. 

The tremble of the first idea, 

every morning, 

before the birds sing.

John Tessitore has been a newspaper reporter, a magazine writer, and a biographer. He has taught British and American history and literature at colleges around Boston and has run national policy studies on education, civil justice, and cultural policy. Most recently, he has published poems in the American Journal of Poetry, Canary, The Wallace Stevens Journal, and forthcoming in Wild Roof and the Sunday Mornings at the River anthology. He has also published a chapbook, I Sit At This Desk and Dream: Notes from a Sunday Morning on Instagram.