A Spring Piece Left In The Middle
Taut, thick fingers punch
the teeth of my typewriter.
Three words are down on paper
in capitals:
SPRING
SPRING
SPRING…
And me — poet, proofreader,
the man who's forced to read
two thousand bad lines
every day
for two liras—
why,
since spring
has come, am I
still sitting here
like a ragged
black chair?
My head puts on its cap by itself,
I fly out of the printer's,
I'm on the street.
The lead dirt of the composing room
on my face,
seventy-five cents in my pocket.
SPRING IN THE AIR…
In the barbershops
they're powdering
the sallow cheeks
of the pariah of Publishers Row.
And in the store windows
three-color bookcovers
flash like sunstruck mirrors.
But me,
I don't have even a book of ABC's
that lives on this street
and carries my name on its door!
But what the hell…
I don't look back,
the lead dirt of the composing room
on my face,
seventy-five cents in my pocket,
SPRING IN THE AIR…
The piece got left in the middle.It rained and swamped the lines.But oh! what I would have written…The starving writer sitting on his three-thousand-page three-volume manuscriptwouldn't stare at the window of the kebab jointbut with his shining eyes would takethe Armenian bookseller's dark plump daughter by storm…The sea would start smelling sweet.Spring would rear up like a sweating red mareand, leaping onto its bare back, I'd ride it into the water.Then my typewriter would follow me every step of the way.I'd say: "Oh, don't do it! Leave me alone for an hour…"thenmy head-my hair failing out— would shout into the distance: "I AM IN LOVE…"
I'm twenty-seven,
she's seventeen.
"Blind Cupid,
lame Cupid,
both blind and lame Cupid
said, Love this girl,"
I was going to write;
I couldn't say it
but still can!
But if
it rained,
if the lines I wrote got swamped,
if I have twenty-five cents left in my pocket,
what the hell…
Hey, spring is here spring is here spring
spring is here!
My blood is budding inside me!
20 and 21 April 1929
Trans. by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk (1993)