Property:Has text
From Off the Road Database
This is a property of type Text.
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<div class="poem">
<p>There is some way, I think, to touch<br />
Those hands of yours that count the nights<br />
Stippled with pink and green advertisements.<br />
And now, before its arteries turn dark,<br />
I would have you meet this bartered blood.<br />
Imminent in his dream, none better knows<br />
The white wafer cheek of love, or offers words<br />
Lightly as moonlight on the eaves meets snow.
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<p>The mind has shown itself at times<br />
Too much the baked and labeled dough<br />
Divided by accepted multitudes.<br />
Across the stacked partitions of the day—<br />
Across the memoranda, baseball scores,<br />
The stenographic smiles and stock quotations <br />
Smutty wings flash out equivocations.
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<p>Anchises’ navel, dripping of the sea,—<br />
The hands Erasmus dipped in gleaming tides,<br />
Gathered the voltage of blown blood and vine;<br />
Delve upward for the new and scattered wine,<br />
O brother-thief of time, that we recall.<br />
Laugh out the meagre penance of their days<br />
Who dare not share with us the breath released,<br />
The substance drilled and spent beyond repair<br />
For golden, or the shadow of gold hair.<br />
Distinctly praise the years, whose volatile<br />
Blamed bleeding hands extend and thresh the <br />
<span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 2em;">height</span><br />
The imagination spans beyond despair,<br />
Outpacing bargain, vocable and prayer.
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<p><span class="mw-poem-indented" style="display: inline-block; margin-inline-start: 10em;">II</span>
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<p>The car backfired, slowed. She yanked the gear from third into first. She sped up. The motor ran like a terrified pounding heart, while the car crept on by inches through filthy mud that stretched ahead of her without relief.
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<div class="poem">
<p>She had had to put the car at that hole. It dropped, far down, and it stayed down. The engine stalled. She started it, but the back wheels spun merrily round and round, without traction. She did not make one inch. When she again killed the blatting motor, she let it stay dead. She peered at her father.
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<div class="poem">
<p>"Well, anyway, most men would be cussing. You acquire merit by not beating me. I believe that's done, in moments like this. If you'd like, I'll get out and crawl around in the mud, and play turtle for you."
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<div class="poem">
<p>She was very tired. She wondered if she might not stop for a moment. Then she came to an upslope. The car faltered; felt indecisive beneath her. She jabbed down the accelerator. Her hands pushed at the steering wheel as though she were pushing the car. The engine picked up, sulkily kept going. To the eye, there was merely a rise in the rolling ground, but to her anxiety it was a mountain up which she--not the engine, but herself--pulled this bulky mass, till she had reached the top, and was safe again--for a second. Still there was no visible end of the mud.
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<div class="poem">
<p>Instantly, the dismay of it rushing at her, she saw the end of the patch of gravel. The road ahead was a wet black smear, criss-crossed with ruts. The car shot into a morass of prairie gumbo--which is mud mixed with tar, fly-paper, fish glue, and well-chewed, chocolate-covered caramels. When cattle get into gumbo, the farmers send for the stump-dynamite and try blasting.
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<p>"Can't! No bottom to this mud. Once stop and lose momentum--stuck for keeps!"
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<p>When the windshield was closed it became so filmed with rain that Claire fancied she was piloting a drowned car in dim spaces under the sea. When it was open, drops jabbed into her eyes and chilled her cheeks. She was excited and thoroughly miserable. She realized that these Minnesota country roads had no respect for her polite experience on Long Island parkways. She felt like a woman, not like a driver.
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<div class="poem">
<p>"Idiot! Ought to have put on my rubbers. Well--too late now," she observed, as she started the engine.
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<p>Her father spoke: "You're biting your lips. They'll bleed, if you don't look out. Better stop and rest.
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<p>In less than two miles the racing motor had used up so much water that she had to make four trips to the creek before she had filled the radiator. When she had climbed back on the running-board she glared down at spats and shoes turned into gray lumps. She was not tearful. She was angry.
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<p>"Heavenly! There's some gravel. We can make time. We'll hustle on to the next town and get dry."
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<p>She was battling to hold the car in the principal rut. She snatched the windshield open, and concentrated on that left rut. She felt that she was keeping the wheel from climbing those high sides of the rut, those six-inch walls of mud, sparkling with tiny grits. Her mind snarled at her arms, "Let the ruts do the steering. You're just fighting against them." It worked. Once she let the wheels alone they comfortably followed the furrows, and for three seconds she had that delightful belief of every motorist after every mishap, "Now that this particular disagreeableness is over, I'll never, never have any trouble again!"
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<p>The weariness of the long strain caught her, all at once. She slipped forward, sat huddled, her knees crossed under the edge of the steering wheel, her hands falling beside her, one of them making a faint brushing sound as it slid down the upholstery. Her eyes closed; as her head drooped farther, she fancied she could hear the vertebrae click in her tense neck.
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<div class="poem">
<p>He was not a father, just now, but a passenger trying not to irritate the driver. He smiled in a waxy way, and said, "Hard luck! Well, you did the best you could. The other hole, there in the road, would have been just as bad. You're a fine driver, dolly."
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