Speculations about “I”

A certain doubleness, by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. — Henry David Thoreau i I didn’t choose the word — it came pouring out of my throat like the water inside a drowned man. I didn’t even push on my stomach. I just lay there, dead (like he told me) & “I” came out. (I’m sorry, Father. “I” wasn’t my fault.) ii (How did “I” feel?) Felt almost alive when I’d get in, like the Trojan horse. I’d sit on the bench (I didn’t look out of the eyeholes so I wouldn’t see the carnage). iii (Is “I” speaking another language?) I said, “I” is dangerous. But at the time I couldn’t tell which one of us was speaking. iv (Why “I”?) “I” was the closest I could get to the one I loved (who I believe was smothered in her playpen). Perhaps she gave birth to “I” before she died. v I deny “I,” & the closer I get, the more “I” keeps receding. vi I found “I” in the bulrushes raised by a dirtiness beyond imagination. I loved “I” like a stinky bed. While I hid in a sentence with a bunch of other words. vii (What is “I”?) A transmission through space? A dismemberment of the spirit? More like opening the chest & throwing the heart out with the gizzards. viii (Translation) Years later “I” came back wanting to be known. Like the unspeakable name of God, I tried my 2 letters, leaving the “O” for breath, like in the Bible, missing. ix I am not the “I” in my poems. “I” is the net I try to pull me in with. x I try to talk with “I,” but “I” doesn’t trust me. “I” says I am slippery by nature. xi I made “I” do what I wasn’t supposed to do, what I didn’t want to do — defend me, stand as an example, stand in for what I was hiding. I treated “I” as if “I” wasn’t human. xii They say that what I write belongs to me, that it is my true experience. They think it validates my endurance. But why pretend? “I” is a kind of terminal survival. xiii I didn’t promise “I” anything & in that way “I” is the one I was most true to.