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 manuscript
wouldn't stare at the window of the kebab joint
but with his shining eyes would take
the Armenian bookseller's dark plump daughter by storm.
.
.

The sea would start smelling sweet.

Spring would rear up
 like a sweating red mare
and, 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.
.
.
"
then
my 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

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