Analysis
by Robert Schultz

This is Michael Carey for Voices from the Prairie a weekly sampling from the rich soil of Iowa’s literary tradition. Today’s poet is Robert Schultz of Decorah in northeast Iowa. In it he juxtaposes the physical imagery of splitting and chopping wood for the winter months and the more abstract concerns of psychological analysis. You can decide for yourself which is being compared to which.

Analysis

Hefting the axe-head,
Throwing it down through
Oak’s red heart,

I wonder and swing,
The wide blue day opening
Worlds within worlds

In winter branches,
In shadowy centers
Of boxwood shrubs

Where the quick eye lingers,
Curious after the hidden
Root of what it sees

And hardly believes:
A globe of living forms
Afloat in glittering air.

The steel head cleaves
Fragrant slabs from rounds,
Uncasking intoxicants—

Wood’s bouquet like
Burgundy aged
In the innermost rings.

Slabs clatter;
Kindling splits
With a few more strokes;

But still red oak holds
Tight in its grain
A bottomless space

Where planets swish
And imagination dives in vain
For grounding or platform.

Meanwhile, back in the bluish
Light of early December,
Two imparadised birds

Are whistling, hidden in pines,
And deep inside a whorl
Of hardwood, blade against burl,

The axe-head rests.
I pry and hammer, pry
‘Til the splitting handle snaps,

Then carry the whole
With its swallowed wedge
Back home to my grate,

Where the knot I could not
Break with my axe,
The fire unties.

"Analysis" by Robert Schultz originally appeared in The Hudson Review and is taken here from the book Winter in Eden published by Loess Hills Books.

For Voices from the Prairie and Humanities Iowa, this is Michael Carey hoping you continue to hear the music blooming all around you.

Biography

When he isn¹t teaching at Luther College, Robert Schultz lives, works and fishes in Decorah and the surrounding countryside. He has published two books of poems Winter in Eden Loess Hills Press (1997) and Vein Along the Fault The Lauroc Press (1979); and one novel The Madhouse Nudes Simon & Schuster (1997). He has received the Virginia Quarterly Review Emily Clark Bolch Prize for Poetry and a National Endowment for the Arts Award.

BACK