My finance teacher, with a voice like Ghandi’s,

is trying to explain the concept of future value.
He says we’ll like finance, because it’s like time travel.

He says it’s nothing like accounting, which is all about
tallying up the deficits of the past. Finance, he says

is all about the future, and so all of its answers
(he cheerfully tells us) are wrong.

Thousands all over the world, we’re listening
to his lecture, and trying to solve the problems

that cast most of us into an ideal future of singing
the song of future value. The magic mirror of finance.

The telephone booth that takes us far into the future
on the day the final payment is made––then back

to calculating the present value of all those payments
down the sluiceway of time. Calculating

as if the winds of hazard and contingency
can be measured out to many decimal places

for my fellow students, faces glowing
from their screens, gazing at the heaven

we’ve always dreamed of––a heaven of ideas
that create value, the best ones attracting

the capital that is always hungrily searching.
So says the tiny head of my professor

who pauses from his work on formulas to stare at us
backward through the camera––each of us out there,

whether in St. Petersburg or Singapore––to say
that he believes we learn best when we have to struggle;

and that some things are too valuable to measure,
and here he offers love as an example, as if

he’s used to assuming his students are young;
and that the problems on the test will be much, much harder

than anything he’s explaining to us now.