These days it is to small things that I go – The double thumbprint on page 83 Of Sir Thomas Browne’s ‘Religio Medici’ That my mother studied sixty years ago.

Her fingers must have paused here as she read How the Devil ‘puts a fallacy’ upon our brows. Even as I revelled among the flowers She thumbed the rubrics I’ve inherited.

Here’s evidence. Her pencil scratched for grace At the farthest edge of dust and nothingness. The crumblings of the parchment gag my chest. In the margin she has left an endless trace.