十二级的阅读书单铺开来
如我们作图分析的句子一样没完没了，
和我们的学年论文大纲一样整洁有序--
我觉得我写的“十四世纪的英国人文主义”
七拼八凑地把伊拉斯莫斯
和教堂拼接到一起，忽略了那些瘟疫流行的岁月，
还有亨利.戴维.梭罗的精辟的名言，踏着
不同的鼓点前进，让我对瓦尔登湖畔
孤独的漫步着迷，不知道他是否每夜和
爱默生和阿尔克特一起进餐；我们的老师
总是充满希望地转向我们，寻求某个
我们发现的一丝火花的迹象，
一种被吸引住的活力，全部在那些
无休止的行进的口号里---她的眼睛闪着亮光，
她卷曲稀疏的头发，她对我们定格，随意搁置的信念
在我们青春的目光里激起易逝的遗憾，
全神贯注于邀请谁去斯万科特.波尔
谁照料周五的足球赛
（谁，她肯定会让我们说）
Twelfth grade reading lists stretched out
as endless as the sentences we diagrammed,
as orderly as the outlines for our senior essays—
“Humanism in England in the Fourteenth Century”
I think I wrote about, cobbling facts together
about Erasmus and the Church, forgetting
those were plague years, and Henry David
Thoreau’s pithy quotes, marching to a different
drummer, hooked me for a solitary ramble
of Walden, not knowing he’d dined every night
with Emerson and Alcott; and our teacher
always turned to us with hope, searching
for some sign that we’d found a spark,
an engaged liveliness, in all those endless
marching words—her eyes lit up, her thin hair
frizzed, her faith in us fixed, misplaced,
stirring fugitive regret in our adolescent gaze,
preoccupied with who to ask to the Swankette Ball
and who to sit with at the Friday football game
(whom, she’d certainly have made us say).
“English Class” by Robin Chapman from Six True Things. © Tebot Bach Books, 2016. Reprinted with permission.
