“My sword I give to him
that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage.”

The inscription at the entrance to Christ Church Meadow,
from John Bunyan's Mr. Valiant-for-Truth

i.
You found the mark where you expected it,
across St. Aldates from Christ Church,
a red sign proclaiming Alice’s Sheep Shop.

On the Oxford tour bus, the guide
described the life of one math tutor,
who as Lewis Carroll wrote Wonderland.

The Queen herself asked for his next book;
he sent her a treatise on numbers--a joke, perhaps
to prove math and literature could be equal.

You took the next stop at England’s smallest cathedral,
bent your knee to poets and mathematicians
as if verse and calculus both could save you.

ii.
You came to Oxford to follow the trail
of an ancestor who attended Oriel.
You fell through the dark space of a door

to emerge on a quad of green. You knelt
for the offered blade, the ancestral pen,
for raven dark ink to connect generations

with a line sketched above and below, an equal sign.
Instead the Queen proclaimed “Off with her head”
and the Cheshire cat played bad croquet

and you knew in your heart it would be like this.
You knew you would follow when the rabbit
scampered past, checking numbers on his watch.