Today it snowed, one of those wet, early-December snows that usually stops as quickly as it starts. But the snow kept falling into the afternoon, and when twenty-five restless first-graders wouldn’t turn their gaze from the windows, couldn’t focus on the too-complicated fractions lesson, Marianne leaned toward them conspiratorially and whispered, “Do you want to hear the best words ever written about snow?”

“Yes!” they mostly screamed.

And she recited the last stanza of Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”

“Ms. Stuart, how do you know that, without looking at a paper?” Sabrina, a favorite, asked without raising her hand.

None of Marianne’s students were particularly good at raising their hands, but they all loved poetry. Marianne recited it again:

It was evening all afternoon.

It was snowing

And it was going to snow.

The blackbird sat

In the cedar-limbs.

“That’s called reciting,” she said. “If you say something enough, it gets stuck in your brain. It’s the same as learning a song. Want to hear the rest?”

They did, and spent the afternoon working on their own poems, inventing the spelling or dictating their lines to Marianne, who copied them in a large hand onto gray loose-leaf. Thirteen Ways of Looking at P.S. 150. Thirteen Ways of Looking at Ms. Stuart. Fifteen Ways of Looking at My Shoes. Ten Ways of Looking at a Subway Rat.

Marianne has been teaching under a provisional license since September, when she moved back to the city and enrolled, using the money Mark sent, in a teacher certification program. Usually she has one good teaching idea a day, one moment when all the students are actually paying attention not because she threatened them or raised her voice or was on the verge of crying but because of her own enthusiasm and energy. Hardly any of these ideas have been planned ahead of time, and most of them are what the principal calls “off task.” Her class celebration after Obama’s reelection, their Panama City pen pal project, the time they wandered the halls with rulers, measuring doorways, floor tiles, the water fountain: this was not what they were supposed to be doing at the time. And certainly the principal would have noticed this off-task poetry writing, but it was snowing, and half the teachers hadn’t even come to work, and because of that there were kids from the second grade crowding Marianne’s classroom, and now they all know some of the words to a famous poem.

It was evening all afternoon.

It was snowing

And it was going to snow.

Thick flakes cover her hair and coat and backpack as she makes her way to the elevated train stop, largely deserted. She is headed to the city—a shorter commute than back to her neighborhood, but still an hour’s train ride, maybe more with weather delays.

Are you sure you can make it? Janine texted her, earlier that day.