This Day in Mystery

The compositor has certain
Kabbalistic tendencies,
Among them a fondness
For lining up coincidences
Numerically as mysteries.
In a long sequence of texts,
Say essays or a diary,
He frequently looks for links
Between the texts and their number
In the chain or between the number
Of links and significant years
Or directly from text to date.

Text 1964 might have 1+9+6+4
Or twenty lines, say, meaning
Nothing, really. Or it might contain
References to Barry Goldwater
Or to the birth of the compositor's sister
Or to an event on that day of this month.
It might encode any number
Of clues to silly things, to nothing.