It could be called ‘Not paying attention to the reliquary’. Or friendship is more important than a finger bone. But at the time it was just a conversation in a church, in a pew, a few rows back from the action which was a crowd around a piece of furniture. I’d read St. Teresa’s Autobiography and knew she wore a favourite dress with an orange border to make an impression when she presented herself as a novice and the dress was ignored. But we are only glancing at the reliquary when we can see it through the crowd. Its proportions strike me as faintly ridiculous, about the size of an incubator. I remember how I recoiled when I was offered a piece of bone from my hip operation.

Poems keep talking and thinking as the lines go down the page. The conversation is lost, though I know we were absorbed in it, careless to the occasion, late to get to our feet like people late to the cinema. Perhaps the closest analogy is Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Doll’s House’ where the littlest Kelvey says ‘I seen the little lamp’. You can own something with the most fleeting look. So we lower our heads and peer in. Glass and polished brass or is it gold, the little panels streak-free as a présentoir I saw in a Paris restaurant where a woman stood on a chair to polish the glass and a man pointed out a smudge. It is airless and the finger bone is safe from further decay.

I think it is because I paid so little attention the saint somehow got into the poem and started talking, noticing our inattention until the very last. There’s a moment of tenderness when her guard drops and she calls the reliquary ‘my little house’ and you might think of a nun doing household chores, ordering provisions. ‘Then they come’ seems like an admonition to her sister nuns, as if recreation is over or someone has overslept. Or is it saying I am more than a bone that has dried out and gone brown?

We walked out of the church and went somewhere and had a glass of wine. Serious things are to be taken lightly which is how Teresa of Avila dealt with the Inquisition when it showed up in its sinister black carriage, rebutting their suspicions and revealing an orthodoxy greater than they could imagine.

It is not a serious poem though: the heart of it is talking to a friend, being in the moment no matter what image goes past, plain or fancy. Being careless when we are told something is holy. Revering what we like. And you can do two things at once: be deeply interested in what a friend is saying and seeing a little house go past with a finger bone inside.