Take the I Out 
     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
     sold 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 earth
     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, for your sake
     too, the I of the beholder — 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.

                        Sharon Olds, TriQuarterly #101, Winter '97-98