But I love the I, steel I-beam <br />that my father sold. They poured the pig iron <br />into the mold, and it fed out slowly, <br />a bending jelly in the bath, and it hardened, <br />Bessemer, blister, crucible, alloy, and he <br />marketed it, and bought bourbon, and Cream <br />of Wheat, its curl of butter right <br />in the middle of its forehead, he paid for our dresses <br />with his metal sweat, sweet in the morning <br />and sour in the evening. I love the I, <br />frail between its flitches, its hard ground <br />and hard sky, it soars between them <br />like the soul that rushes, back and forth, <br />between the mother and father. What if they had loved each other, <br />how would it have felt to be the strut <br />joining the floor and roof of the truss? <br />I have seen, on his shirt-cardboard, years <br />in her desk, the night they made me, the penciled <br />slope of her temperature rising, and on <br />the peak of the hill, first soldier to reach <br />the crest, the Roman numeral I-- <br />I, I, I, I, <br />girders of identity, head on, <br />embedded in the poem. I love the I <br />for its premise of existence--our I--when I was <br />born, part gelid, I lay with you <br />on the cooling table, we were all there, a <br />forest of felled iron. The I is a pine, <br />resinous, flammable root to crown, <br />which throws its cones as far as it can in a fire.<br /><br />Sharon Olds<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/take-the-i-out/
