Classic Poem

As I sat down one evening
In a small cafe,
A forty-year-old waitress
These words to a man did say:

" I see you are a logger
And not just a common bum,
Because nobody but a logger
Stirs his coffee with his thumb.

" My lover was a logger;
There's none like him today.
If you poured whiskey on it,
He would eat a bale of hay.

" He never shaved the whiskers
From off of his horny hide;
He drove them in with a hammer
And bit them off inside.

" My lover he came to see me,
'Twas on one freezing day;
He held me in a fond embrace
That broke three vertebrae.

" He kissed me when we parted
So hard that it broke my jaw;
I could not speak to tell him
He forgot his mackinaw.

" I saw my lover leaving,
Sauntering through the snow,
Going bravely homeward
At forty-eight below.

" The weather it tried to freeze him,
It tried its level best.
At a hundred degrees below zero
He buttoned up his vest.

" It froze clear through to China,
It froze to the stars above.
At a thousand degrees below zero
It froze my logger love.

" And so my lover perished.
To this cafe I've come,
And here I wait till someone
Stirs his coffee with his thumb. "