LOGGER LOVER
(learned at camp in the 1940s)
As I went out one morning, 'twas in a small cafe,
I see that you are a logger, and not just a common bum,
My lover was a logger, there's none like him today,
He never shaved a whisker from off his horny hide.
My lover came to see me, 'twas on a winter's day.
He kissed me when we parter, so hard that it broke my jaw.
I watched him as he left me, trudging through the snow,
The weather tried to freeze him, it tried its level best.
It froze clear down to China, it froze to the heavens above.
They tried in vain to thaw him, and if you believe it, sir,
And so I lost my lover, and to this cafe I've come,
(from miriam berg's folksong collection)
A forty-year-old waitress to me these words did say.
For nobody but a logger stirs his coffee with his thumb.
If you poured whiskey on it he'd eat a bale of hay.
He hammered in the bristles and bit them off inside.
He hugged me in a fond embrace that broke three vertebrae.
I couldn't speak to tell him he forgot his mackinaw.
A-goin' gaily homeward at forty-eight below.
At a hundred degrees below zero, he buttoned up his vest.
At a thousand degrees below zero, it froze my logger love.
They made him into axe-blades to cut the Douglas fir.
And here I wait for someone who stirs coffee with his thumb.