Eighteen words, five lines, and the poem still manages to turn a man into a coat rack, a tree and a sheet of paper. A sheriff never appears in it. He exists only in the title, which tells us whose coat the speaker is opening. The central idea, as the poem suggests, is that stepping into an office of authority doesn't dress you up so much as use you up. Put on the role and the person underneath is gradually replaced by what the role needs: something to lean on, something to hang things from, something to write on.
The action starts out plain: "I open a velvet coat." The speaker opens the coat rather than putting it on, as if it were a door or a cupboard, and what lies behind it is not a body but wood: "and am oak." Velvet is soft, rich and a little ceremonial, which makes it a good costume for status. Oak is the opposite texture, hard, old and dependable, the material of doors, beams and heavy furniture. The first two lines move from surface to substance, and the speaker is on the wrong side of that exchange. The soft thing was only a cover, and the hard thing is what he has become.
Then comes "a place to hang." The phrase works on two levels at once. Practically, a coat needs somewhere to hang, so the oak is a peg or a stand. But with "Sheriff" overhead, the verb picks up a darker meaning, and oak starts to look like the kind of tree a rough justice might use. The poem never says so. It simply ends the line on "hang" and lets the word dangle in the white space, which is the most fitting way to treat it.
The next line drops the tone sharply: "and itch." After the weight of oak and hanging, this is small, bodily and almost comic. Velvet shouldn't itch, which hints at an uncomfortable fit between the man and the role. Because there is no punctuation, the grammar stays loose. "A place to hang and itch" can describe the oak as a spot where someone hangs and itches, or itch can be one more thing the speaker does. Either way, the grand image has an irritation inside it. The one who bears the weight still feels something.
The last line, "and change to paper," completes the chain. Wood really does become paper, so the oak is pulped and pressed flat. A sheriff's world is full of paper, from warrants to notices to wanted posters, so the transformation fits the title neatly. The speaker moves from person to furniture to the written instruments of the law. There is also a more playful reading. Paper is what a poem is printed on, so the "I" may end as the page we are holding, a speaker who has turned into his own text.
The form carries this quiet slide. The lines run roughly six, three, four, two and five syllables, shrinking to the abrupt "and itch" before opening out again. There is no rhyme and no punctuation, and the only capital is the pronoun "I", fittingly the first thing to be lost. Sound still binds the lines: "open," "coat" and "oak" share a rounded long *o*, which makes the first transformation feel inevitable, while the soft *v*'s of "velvet" give way to the clipped *tch* of "itch." The repeated "and" at the start of three lines turns the changes into a casual list, with no fuss or alarm. That flat, matter-of-fact tone is what makes the poem faintly eerie. After "open," the speaker does nothing. Things simply happen to him, as "am" and "change" take over from the active verb.
The poem is worth reading closely because of how much it does with so little. It treats the title as a working part of the poem, lets one word, "hang," carry both homely and sinister meanings, and builds a complete arc from cloth to wood to paper without explaining any of it. It leaves a reader to decide whether the speaker is a victim of his office, a willing support for it, or simply a poet watching himself become a page.