With a line from Diane Seuss

I soaked the cotton and sewed it into pockets to pin to twine, tucked in touchstones to take us toward shorter nights. Oh give thanks for the mineral kingdom, for mordants that bond color to fibers of fabric. For weld hiding a wooden bird. For eucalyptus holding Three Kings soap from a small business in Wisconsin. And hopi: local Honey Agate. Feld: stars. Black walnut: your name, reverse cross-stitched on a stocking so you’ll remember what I can make. Cochineal: the painted fox with removable tail we bought you in Mexico City. Marigold: summer cyanotypes preserving old wind. Turmeric: I looked up into the dark for something to bloom by. Madder: girls can do hard things. Cosmos: my uncle drove my cousins and me to our great uncle’s house to sing “Silent Night” in German on Christmas Eve when I was in college. He brought his trumpet, and we arranged ourselves into a respectable three-part harmony, and afterwards we got cookies, and that’s the great uncle who died last year of an unexpected stroke. Maya blue: an orange. Purple basil: street lights on the underside of a thousand nodules. Olive leaf: the Fibonacci sequence. Ochre: as a child I loved this book about a boy isolated in a forest with enviable survival skills, whose mother abandoned him, just walked out the door, but when he grew up he discovered she’d been a magician all along pursuing her important magician career, and his own destiny was to climb stairs into the sky to save her. Logwood: pencil sharpener. Indigo: the apron I salvaged from the box of grandmother’s old things after she died, reverse cross-stitched blooms stained brown with coffee or blood the way any bluestar turns at the end. Cinnamon: salt dough you threaded with pink ribbon. Sunflower: my voice, returning. Wine: folic acid. Carrot: my college choir director told us to “sausage” when he wanted us to shape a long note—to begin softly, to swell, then ease (the shape of everything—the three-act structure, the bridge, youth, copulation, volta). Black bean: a mother invented the first advent calendar for her son. Of course her son monetized it. Of course his mother sewed her gifts shut. Of course her son used doors. Lavender: benign. Blackberry leaves: they’re everywhere this year—the calendars I mean, in this economy. They’re magical, a way of gifting time, a method of slowing down, content for your story, commissions, all those samples for women with purchasing power who may buy full-sized in the new year. Foundation. Serums. Avocado: hope, the sort only an exterminator can kindle. Onion peel: the itch where the biopsy needle went in, the open tear duct, the coloring sheet of the nativity covered in stickers printed with my dead grandmother’s return address.