Take the I Out by Sharon Olds

But I love the I, steel I-beam

that my father sold. They poured the pig iron

into the mold, and it fed out slowly,

a bending jelly in the bath, and it hardened,

Bessemer, blister, crucible, alloy, and he

marketed it, and bought bourbon, and Cream

of Wheat, its curl of butter right

in the middle of its forehead, he paid for our dresses

with his metal sweat, sweet in the morning

and sour in the evening. I love the I,

frail between its flitches, its hard ground

and hard sky, it soars between them

like the soul that rushes, back and forth,

between the mother and father. What if they had loved each other,

how would it have felt to be the strut

joining the floor and roof of the truss?

I have seen, on his shirt-cardboard, years

in her desk, the night they made me, the penciled

slope of her temperature rising, and on

the peak of the hill, first soldier to reach

the crest, the Roman numeral I--

I, I, I, I,

girders of identity, head on,

embedded in the poem. I love the I

for its premise of existence--our I--when I was

born, part gelid, I lay with you

on the cooling table, we were all there, a

forest of felled iron. The I is a pine,

resinous, flammable root to crown,

which throws its cones as far as it can in a fire.

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