Daniel Lawless

  —from Definitions

A blood-letting tool, a vestigial claw. A liturgical vestment, a kind of stitch or stenographical notation, a vase, a fresh-born eel. It’s fun now to imagine it could be any of these, but In 1967 the right answer was “the little sheath at the end of a shoelace”—

Da’s nightly vocabulary quiz, home from the Galway cab-yard, The summer before Séan and I would try for posh Saint Tim’s. More than fifty years but I can still see it: his pressed shirt and flocked cap, that pipe He claimed the Mayor himself had given him. The two of us watching A drop of spittle trickle the length of its lacquered stem As he continued “… from the Old French, Aiguille, ‘“needle’”. To point or pierce. Colloquially a small sorrow.”