13.2 Fall/Winter 2015

Reflection in the High Varnish of a Little White Lie: A Cento

Contributor’s Marginalia: Shara Lessley on 32 Poems 13.2

It’s always a little sad when the latest round of our marginalia series concludes and we finally put an issue to bed, but this week’s entry offers a particularly lovely way to say goodbye. Here, Shara Lessley gives us a cento composed of language she’s mined from 32 Poems 13.2, a poem in which you’ll hear Diane Suess, Hailey Leithauser, Bruce Bond, Michael Bazzett, Claudia Emerson, and full dozen others all singing in chorus. (*You can find the complete listing of Shara’s sources after poem.)

We hope you enjoy this last bit of marginalia from 13.2, and that this will send you back into the issue one more time before the new 32 Poems tries to replace it.

Reflection in the High Varnish of a Little White Lie: A Cento


The moon has slipped off her slip, the night
let sail his ship. On an unknown rain-darkened
street in a cathedral in a part of the city where
the Old World dreams of a long, calm sea

the saints’ bodies, even after a hundred years
dredge up the past beneath the trail
to emphasize their casual nakedness.
Is it enough to love the world again,

the heavens? Nothing will happen tonight
and still this ache, this barometer
the waters hold. The steady slope of the ocean
terminates its crisp folds, its fragile case, its ink

as though windblown, or gravity-blown, something
like keys on the dresser of a dark room—where
matter and energy are pulling us through.
It’s like how time moves. Birds, pockets of air.

Not at all, then all at once. We first emerge,
we emerge first from a belly-deep abyss:
the tide moves under us and egrets lift
and we quit holding our tongues and begin to sing.

At this point in our lives we expect to be more.
The waters hold a clear and cold account untold
of storms and stress and whatever bluster
it swells to paralyze the damage, or try.

Nothing will happen tonight. Above the beach
breathing white and insomniac the spindle-legged
plovers forage. One glints as a band of light
moves, dreams of a long, calm sea

in the end. The tide moves under us. We both—
jailer and jailed alike—see the boat
launched from the shore set aflame.

[32 Poems, Volume 13, Number 2, Fall/Winter 2015. Sources: Seuss, Leithauser, Bazzett, Rancourt, Minicucci, Rancourt, Piazza, Arthur, Emerson, Bazzett, Bond, Mann, Kroll, Falk, Emerson, Fagan, Givhan, Kroll, Dentz, Kroll, Majmudar, Hemp, Bazzett, Fagan, Mann, Bond, Bazzett, Kroll, Fagan, Seuss, Minicucci, Hemp, Minicucci. Some capitalization and punctuation has been changed.]

Shara Lessley, a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, is the author of Two-Headed Nightingale (New Issues, 2012). Her awards include a 2015 NEA Fellowship, the Mary Wood Fellowship from Washington College, an Artist Fellowship from the State of North Carolina, the Diane Middebrook Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin, Colgate University’s O’Connor Fellowship, The Gilman School’s Tickner Fellowship, and a “Discovery”/The Nation prize. Shara’s work has appeared in Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, Gettysburg Review, and New England Review, among others. She is currently editing an anthology of essays on poetry and place with the poet Bruce Snider and can be reached at www.sharalessley.com.