Addition and subtraction were the Our Father,
multiplication and division the Hail Mary
of the sunlit doom-bathed classroom.
The children, heads down over the blue-lined sheets,
grown silent and baffled as birds in an eclipse.
From the lintel above the alphabet’s danse macabre,
a polar bear gazed with benign power
out the tall windows at the back of the room,
a symbol of freedom for any sad scribbler
who glanced up from the sardine-net of bewilderment.
Senora N was a severe beauty, perpetually in black.
Her long pale fingers stabbing staccato numerals
on the blackboard, her praise rare as gemstones,
and hungered for.
Perpetually disappointed
in her little grown-ups, she urged them, unsmiling,
to each new loss.
She folded the offending newspaper into her lap,
stared through the glittering windows.
The deaths on the coast were never spoken of,
the railroad magnate with a carbon hole in his temple
and beside him, in the passenger seat, his suicided
secretary, Senora’s kid sister, seven weeks pregnant.