West Highland by Thomas Lynch

无论何时我听见他们古老的名字--
勒拿，科拉.梅，莉迪亚，和碧--
我就会想到古板的，西部高地镇
浸信会教堂里的寡妇们；
想象她们有秩序的，重生的生活
超出觉醒和便利店随意拓展的
后现代的郊区之外。
在同样的地方过活，如同她们的妈妈
和在她们多年之前的，她们母亲的娘家人一样，
在家常便饭，烤饼义卖和集贸市场之间，
布道所和复兴会，礼拜天复礼拜天。
对于传奇故事，她们有《要记住的夜晚》--
夏天，圣经学校野餐，
十月，《农业局丰收舞会》。
整个冬天，她们在客厅里
向名字叫瑟尔门德或威尔伯或罗素劳埃德的男人求婚。
她们在复活节结婚，生孩子
活得比她们的丈夫长，现在照管着坟墓
礼拜天仪式结束后，如果天气允许。
无论我何时看见她们，都手挽手，
葬礼上，她们吟唱，带来烤火腿
以纪念她们姐妹中，许多年年前
在养老院中死去的那位，
我想到这个世纪之于她们如何呢
既不是战争也不是科学也不是晚间新闻
只是随着时间推移，模糊记得的一些宗教仪式：
洗礼，婚礼，和葬礼。
我羡慕他们配备得像客厅一样的天堂
长沙发上有钩针编织的装饰小垫子
西西里亚姨婆，从没有结过婚，
唱着“在花园”或“与我同住”
天父在他的扶手椅里点头致意
来来往往的圣徒和天使听着
他们的脸长得像她们能叫得上名字的邻居们。
Whenever I hear their aged names—
Lena, Cora Mae, Lydia, Bea—
I think of prim, widowed ladies from
the Baptist Church in West Highland Township;
and imagine their ordered, born-again lives
beyond the latter-day suburban sprawl
of disenchantment and convenience stores.
Lives lived out at the same pace as their mothers
and their mothers’ people years before them,
between potlucks and bake sales and bazaars,
missions and revivals, Sunday to Sunday.
And for romance, they had Nights to Remember—
in summer, the Bible School picnics,
October, the Farm Bureau Harvest Ball.
All winter long, they courted in parlors
with men named Thurmond or Wilbur or Russell Lloyd.
They married at Easter and bore children
and outlived their husbands and tend the graves now
after Sunday services, weather permitting.
Whenever I see them, arm in arm,
at funerals where they sing or bring baked hams
in memory of one of their sisters, dead
of the long years or the nursing home,
I think of how the century for them
was neither wars nor science nor the evening news
but a blur of careful rites of passage:
baptisms and marriages and burials.
And I envy their heavens furnished like parlors
with crocheted doilies on the davenport
and Aunt Cecelia, who never got married,
singing “In the Garden” or “Abide with Me”
and God the Father nodding in His armchair
at saints and angels who come and go
with faces like neighbors and with names they know.
“West Highland” by Thomas Lynch from Still Life in Milford. © Norton, 1988. Reprinted with permission.