Can we trust numbers?

Poet Lucia Perillo was honored Monday evening, December 13 at the Library of Congress -- as her collection Inseminating the Elephant won the 2010 Bobbit National Prize for Poetry.  It was my good fortune to be there to hear her read.  She is direct and upretentious, tough and witty.  An evening of good poetry read well.  Perillo has an undergraduate degree in wildlife management and her deep understandings of the natural world are evident in her poems.  In  an earlier collection, we find "In Light of the Absent Constant," a Perillo poem of science and number: