Classic Poem

I'm using the saw again.
At some point forgetting
the momentary pain of severing my finger
now I am using the saw again.
Even in its tiresome everyday motions
teeth gleaming, my saw is precise.
Cutting to the heart in a feeble age
it lives by advancing grandly.
The sunlight is still confined in the feathers of the clouds.
On a day when the snow comes like a cold white rumor,
I stand at the dusty windowsill
covering all sorts of mistakes
as I peer into the history of this dry wood.
Do you know about it,
the slipshod carpenters' tower in broad daylight?
That was when our skin had been soaked
with the long lamentation of our mothers' burning love.
There was a skill that lay everywhere hidden
but only unripe evidences glistened through,
shaved daily by the starved blade of the plane.
Outside now
each house crumbles under its own weight into the night,
snow falls throughout the deep night.
At last the mountain withdraws and sits on its cold cushion.
In my dream the huge mountain
buries its head in a white grave and weeps.
Passing through the deep forest where I
hear the coughing of dead carpenters
I have cold, such cold premonitions,
lie awake at dawn aching all over
and by habit taking the saw I use again
go out to put behind me one more frostbitten day.
In this place where the painful rays of light
of the severed hours gather, I float in the air.
Yet in the queasiness of many winds blowing
my bones are solid pewter,
all the strands of my hair are white with frost.
As I bow, my eyes are pierced
by the short limbs of the people I greet
in this winter of busy coming and going;
also, somewhere,
the carpenters are cutting.
With them I too am cutting
the winter that cracks my every joint and
the skeleton of the freshest dream
held at the tips of my groping fingers.
At some point forgetting
the momentary pain of severing my finger
now I am using the saw again.