At the end of the year I couldn’t remember the word
colander, a word I love and have always thought of
as one of those words that’s lovelier than the thing
itself. I was holding the thing itself in my hands,
the steaming angel hair pasta draining in the sink
on the last night of the last day of the old year
when I looked at the colander and thought to myself,
“What is the name of this thing?” And maybe it’s age,
and maybe it’s the beginning of something more
pernicious, but in the end we have to let go
of everything. We have to let go of every single
thing and its name. And because I have always loved
the names of things more than the things themselves
I stood at the sink missing colander, loving it more
than the colander, more than the angel hair pasta
that I chewed abstractedly over dinner, trying to locate
colander in my mouth, where it always used to live
until it disappeared—its three slippery syllables like
three spaghetti noodles in a pot of fungible spaghetti noodles.
And on New Year’s Day when I finally remembered it—
found it right where I’d left it—I whispered it to myself
over and over, like a lover whispering the name of a
lost beloved
who returns, but is untrue, and will disappear again.
INSTANT NOODLES 