A poem with two numbers

My friend Carol Ann Heckman has studied with Denise Levertov and feeds voraciously on her work.  For many years I have loved Levertov's "The Secret" and today, rereading an email from Carol Ann, I went looking for a mathy poem by this beloved poet.  I found the following -- with two numbers (and a hint of recursion):

     The Mockingbird of Mockingbirds     by Denise Levertov

     A greyish bird
     the size perhaps of two plump sparrows,
     fallen in some field,
     soon flattened, a dry
     mess of feathers--
     and no one knows
     this was a prince among his kind,
     virtuoso of virtuosos,
     lord of a thousand songs,
     debonair, elaborate in invention, fantasist,
     rival of nightingales.

This poem rests on my bookshelf in Levertov's collection, Breathing the Water (New Directions, 1987).

Cryptography -- an MAA lecture and a poem

     Living near the Silver Spring metro station, on the border of Washington, DC, makes travel to the offices of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA)  an easy trip for me, and I am able to enjoy occasional lectures at MAA's Carriage House Conference Center.  On December 9 I was fortunate to attend an entertaining and informative lecture on  "Cryptography:  How to Keep a Secret," by UC Irvine math-computer-science professor (and Numb3rs consultant), Alice Silverberg. (Podcasts of lectures are available at the MAA site.) 

Discovering the Secret

In this Robert Frost couplet, “The Secret Sits,”  the poet may not have intended to speak of mathematics but his lines sing true for mathematical discovery.

We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

from The Witness Tree.