I stopped at the bakery on my way to work and got stuck in the lot, and two kind men in woolen hats heped get me loose again. The whole day felt like a snow day, even at midnight in the newsroom. Like a holiday.

So for the holidays I wish us all time to shovel snow and moments of calm and moments of glee — times when a job feels elatedly right and times to rest.

And most of all, a blessing on any who are feeling the holidays as something new, or for the first time.

A wish for your son’s first nights
For Rachel

When you sit, all three wrapped in blankets,
in the early dark, blue on the shoulders
of the hills, letting pillows hold your heads,
and listen to the bubble of his breathing,
let the quiet instill warmth, in the new way
tinder and cardboard on the hearth kindle.

Your husband brings in wood. You light the candles,
sing she’hecheyanu and tuck in blankets.
While the candles burn, you may sit this way,
one head against your thigh, one on your shoulder,
and hum with the resonance of their breathing,
your hand on his head, your head against his head.

You know tonight and need not count ahead.
One candle for each night and one to kindle
make nine, one for each night he has had breath,
one for each night tired men in muddy blankets
paced a stone floor, rubbing knotted shoulders,
waiting for a light to fade away.

Because one oil lamp would not burn away
you slide a hand behind an infant head
supporting with a hand behind his shoulders
so he can see the sinking of the candles
as they settle into waxy blankets.
You kneel to feed the hearth fire with your breath.

You whisper over him the words you breathed
over the candles and tell him the way
to sing them, as you burrow into blankets,
all three of you. Your husband strokes your head.
You close your eyes and small reflections kindle
behind your eyelids as he rubs your shoulders.

Let soft wool lie lightly on your shoulders.
Let you feel, all three, the same soft breathing.
In astonished dark small lights are kindled,
until tonight you circle this slight weight
who rests in a palm and cannot raise his head.
Tell him long after he outgrows these blankets

how you stroked his head beneath the blankets
while night slipped away. How you felt his breathing
against your shoulder. How he kindled the night.

This evening, my friend The Velveteen Rabbi posted a response to this week’s readwritepoem prompt so beautful that I had to write one of my own.

Here’s mine.

Preservation

We sat on their porch, and you held my hands.
We sat on the floor on Easter weekend.
And I was shaking, not from the cold
we get in the hills, even in July,
because I could have lost what I was building.
Twenty-one friends eating chocolate downstairs
at the farm where we rode together as teenagers,
and we were talking novels eye to eye.
Inside they washed dishes and piled old corn cobs.
I had had this work barely six months.
If she takes it, I said, she will not know
or care what she has taken from me.
Mills and fires and jubilations
I want to give you — after all this time
as close colleagues as we ever were
in stables, mucking stalls and singing Graceland,
as close as I felt the day you married
in a New England tavern with mango rice,
thirty years of friendship in one warm rain,
and we fed apples to the horses next door
from the porch table under crimson stars —
You have saved your fields twice and lost far more
than I have ever built, and still you hold me.

If this works, I’m hoping to find someone to work with for a good long time; I want to feel confident in them. This is work it will help me to do. I would want to know at least whether an agent might like my kind of book and way of writing and values before I sent a query letter. In any case, asking an agent to do work that I should do is the best way I can think of to get turned down, and they would be right to turn me down.

The questions is: how to find out? Some agents I’ve researched give examples of books they have represented, in which case the answer is in part to read the books. But many do not. One agency (one I have a recommendation for) lists nonfiction books but not fiction, though they represent novels.

I know why. I deal enough with people wanting my time, in my own job, to know how this works. Agents want to protect their writers and themselves, and they should. But I want to know more about them and their world than a few articles in Writer’s Digest can tell me. So it’s my job to go looking.

It’s the one most of the guides I’ve found don’t talk about. When I was job hunting, the first part was self-reflective: defining what you were looking for. The second part was networking. You have to ask questions — but you have to ask the right ones. What I’m looking for now are the questions to ask.

The best way to find an agent or a job is to know someone who knows one. When I was looking for a job, I learned how to ask for help so that I didn’t intrude. The right question was: would you talk with me for ten minutes about what you do or do you know anyone I might talk to?.

When it comes to agents, there are two standard approaches I can see. The better and harder one is to find a person who can recommend me to an agent. The other is the query letter. In the first, in some cases, a variation on the job questions may work. In the second case, I think the right question is a variation on: may I tell you about my book.

It isn’t would you publish my book. I’m guessing here, but I know it frustrates me when someone gets in touch with me at work and says, ‘would you write a story about about me?’ I can’t answer that question until I know more about them; it’s no good asking until they have told me what they are doing and why it’s exciting.

And I want to make the offer. I just put that into words, and there are reasons behind it. I want to feel confident in any story I assign. Anyone is welcome to give me story ideas, but no one is welcome to press me to commit to a story in a hurry. What I run is my responsibility, and the people who want stories from me don’t know the constraints I’m working under.

Once, I asked for information from a PR rep, and she wrote back to say she had set up an interview for me. This put me in an awkward position; I had wanted color to fill out a press release, but there were a number of reasons why I could not have written or run a story about her organization and event then if I had wanted to. I had to write and tell her to cancel the interview.

Some questions can close a discussion before it begins. So I can appreciate that it is important to ask the right question. Ask it as well as possible — ask it at the right time — ask it knowing that agents want good books the way I want good story ideas, and that we both want good writers. But find out how to ask it.

I say this humbly. I’m a brown trout in a beaver pond, and I like it that way; I know these are pilot whales and humpbacks and belugas I’m trying to call, and that’s why it feels so large. But whale song is a marvel when you can hear it right.

And I have a book to sell.

Yes, it still needs work. But there comes a time when you have to try to do something with it regardless. It has a structure now; it has the shape of the book it will be. Revisions won’t mean taking it apart and putting it back together, as the last three drafts have done. So it’s time to start working on the next part.

I went down to the local library and checked out most of its books about literary agents. That makes four, all five to ten years out of date. (Any that look useful I’ll look for in an updated edition.) I’m trying right now to get a sense of how the process works. It’s huge, and I’ll need to break it into manageable pieces, but I can’t cut it til I’ve got it assembled. (Like pie.)

So I’m going to be talking a lot about it here. As I figure out what I want to know, especially if the books won’t tell me, I’ll be thinking things through here, trying to figure out how to act on it and what questions to ask.

Here’s a start.

From what I’ve read so far, finding a literary agent sounds almost exactly like finding a job, except that if it works, I’ll be paying them. The most useful book I’ve found so far (the one least like a telephone directory) used a lot of the language you’ll find in What Color Is Your Parachute.

But it didn’t tell me a lot of what I want to know. It concentrated on questions that are either too early or too late. Do I want an agent? Yes. I already know why, too. I want people to read my book. And a) No editor with two brain cells to rub together will look at a manuscript that doesn’t have an agent. b) I don’t have the background to interpret contracts or copyright law, let alone foreign rights. c) I’ve hated selling things since I was old enough to knock on doors. And d) Agents know people. That’s their job, and it’s vitally important.

All those are jobs I won’t have to worry about uless and until I find an agent to do them. I’m just saying, in a New York oyster shell, that’s what agents do, and I know it; I don’t need a fifty page treatise to convince me of it. I also don’t need to know yet what to say to an agent at our first meeting.

I hope I’ll need to know it some day not too far off. But right now, I need to know how to get an agent to meet me. And I have more ideas about htat from my job hunt a year ago than from anywhere else.

From conversations, reading and extrapolation, here are the steps I can see to take. I’m setting this down as a general guide for myself; feedback’s welcome of course.

1. Determine what kind of literary agent I’m looking for, what I want a literary agent to do and what kind of relationship I’d like most.

In Parachute terms, this means filling in the early chapters: the ones that explain what different kinds of jobs hunt look like and then give you ways of assessing yourself, so that when you ask people for help in finding a job, you know what you’re looking for.

2. Write a sample query, get advice on it, revise.

This is the equivalent of having a polished resume and samples with you when you get to an informational interview, just in case.

3. Talk to the contacts I aready have.

There are a handful of them. When I’ve done enough work to feel that I can ask them useful questions, and not get told just what my pocket guide has already told me, I need to see how many of them will talk to me. That could mean showing them a query if all goes well — the way that an informational interview can let you leave a resume with someone. But all I mean to ask is, will they talk with me about the industry.

4. Talk to anyone they send me to.

5. Assemble a list of possible agents.
That means agents who will bother with an unknown writer — but also agens who are good at their job. The job-hunting manuals remind you that wneh you get an interview, you are also interviewing the workplace, deciding whether you wnat to be there. They know that you’ll be feeling vulnerable and overeager. They tell you to choose a place where you’re comfortable. The agent-hunting manuals tell you the same thing. Who’d-a-thunk, huh.

Of course, there are differences. On the one hand, my entire livelihood doesn’t hang on getting an agent. I have time. On the other hand, there’s more than one job in the world that I can enjoy. This book has a lot more of who I am in it.

He had already had to scale back, and the things he had left all belonged to him. I remember them in their places. We tried to come up with their stories, where they were made, what flea market he found them in, what craftsman in his city made them, all the time we were dispersing them.

My aunt brought the bed he had made for her, and them kept for her when she moved, into a guest room where she always sleeps. The posts scraped the ceiling, and we spent a hilarious half hour trying to find four places where the floor boards were low and the ceiling was high at the same time.

We brought his medical school microscope home for my sister. She and her boyfriend were packing up her first year med school dorm. The case has my grandfather’s name on it — Mister —. I’ve never seen it written out like that. He’s been a doctor since my mother was born.

My parents went to pick up my grandfather, then, and my brother and I took over a job that had been my grandfather’s all through our childhoods. We drove back to the city where he has lived all his life, through the archway on Wooster Street where the tricolore flies, and waited in line at Frank Pepe’s Pizzaria.

When we were kids, and my grandfather lived a short jog from there, he used to wait there for us, an hour or more at a time. He’s been coming to Pepe’s for 92 years, and he knew all the guys in the kitchen. We would sit on the counter, near the juke box, watching them deal slices of mozzarella onto the rounds of dough, and sometimes they would give us slices of cheese.

My brother and I sat on the window ledge in the lobby, breathing garlic and oregano every time the door opened, and waving the line in ahead of us. A team of teenage girls pased the window in basketball jerseys, eating lemon italian ices. We waited an hour or more.

My grandfather came in on my father’s arm. I sat on a bench next to him. He said, is your name Margaret?

It isn’t.

Then he said, you have a new job. I do. And he told us he had just learned that Margot is a German nickname for Margaret, and that Damariscotta, Maine, have gotten its name from Damaris cove.

He does still know me. He does still know that he loves us. When we had all gathered, and toasted, and stretched out dinner until my sister and her boyfriend made it through traffic (eat slowly, my mom said, as soon as the pizzas touched down), we all saw him home. And he told us so.

He told us stories about the paintings he still has, and the ship’s wheel, and the lamp he made from a lignum vitae dead-eye that came off the last Canadian wooden ship to challenge the American clippers. Her name was the Blue Nose.

And I had another post in mind when I sat down to write this one, about books and plots and making the risks real. But I wound up writing about my own instead. My grandfather looked after me, and gave me pretzels in his waiting room, with the elevator that had a diamond pane of glass in the door so you could watch the brick wall slide by. He got me into the Yale library, all through high school, and once into Beinike, so I could look at Papist tracts about Colonel Thomas Blood. He paid house calls and built wooden boats in his back yard and let me try his sextant for a science project.

He lives in a room slightly larger than my sister’s dorm room. As far as I know, he isn’t in pain. At 92, to be warm and dry and fed and loved is a great deal. I just don’t want him to be lonely.

So this blog will run on a kind of reverse academic schedule for the forseeable future. Whatever writing time I carve out over the summer I’ve been saving for my novel. But I’ll still be here when I can.

There’s a pleasure in absorption. It’s finding out what I can produce, and holding each magazine in my hands when it’s finished. It’s walking through new buildings, and reading my freelancers’ hikes up trails three miles from here that I’ve never heard of, and getting to tell people about them. It’s sending a staff writer off on his first trail ride and hearing him laugh about it afterward. I feel that I’m doing good work.

And in the cracks, when I’m walking home late on a deadline day, blissful because it’s done, sometimes somewhere along the wood fence by the stream in the park I pull out a pocket notebook and jot a note about my own book. My novel is always with me, and it hasn’t stopped reminding me that the hardest chapters are here already.

I am loving this season for its bareness. Mixing bread dough in the morning, barefoot in pajamas, I gloat when the stretched neckline of the old shirt I wear slides over my shoulders. I’m loving the blue haze of mountains, and I’m loving the headlong rush of work, most of the time. In part for the way it makes me think, and carefully finger all my spare moments, and for the way it keeps me here.

It’s easy to be impatient in a new place, in a new job — to want comfort and company all at once, and to feel I should be doing more, faster. I still have five chapters left in a draft I wanted to have done in May, and I’m still single, and I still haven’t planted snapdragons under the front window or oregano by the drain pipe. And I’m still laughing at myself. You see what I mean?

Too much absorption can be dangerous. But all the same, if you never let yourself fall wholly into something, you never stretch yourself wholly. The greatest joy of graduate school was to let myself love the work I wanted, and choose it, and knock myself silly finding out how to do it. Now I’ve done that, a few minutes by the stream in the dark, and a few hours writing longhand in my arm chair, will keep me going weeks at a stretch.

Without that time to want it openly and think it through, I wouldn’t be able to see the work clearly. I feel more firmly myself for it. So I’m wishing, for many people I know, enough sleep, and enough spurring from like minds, and enough space, and enough time to fall in love.

World enough and time
For Rachel on her birthday, March 21, 2008

When you are walking wide streets under palms
or leaning forward at an outdoor table,
let the sun steep you in the gentle heat
of argument. A breeze lifts linen from you.
Bowls of dates hold corners of translations,
and muezzins call, not far away.

People from all reaches of away
felt with you the soft, dry shade of palms
and read with you translations of translations.
They cupped a flame and blessed a sabbath table
and left that flame to live today with you.
Hold to your forehead that absorbing heat.

This afternoon you will run the first heat.
The canopy has been folded away
and all the courtyard beckons bright around you.
Drink among the orange trees and palms.
Talk begins like rain around the table,
and you begin to write your own translations.

Among you, you will write your own translations
as once Toledans quickened in the heat
a university around a table
with a hundred definitions of away.
A ladder rung leaves friction on your palms.
Stories out of stories will enthrall you.

Classmates chant a blessing, turn to you,
laughing with the quick joy of translations.
Clap and sing contemporary psalms
until your palms are glowing with the heat.
Now within time, every here and away,
every sabbath table is this table.

Swallows’ shadows fly across the table.
Dusk has cooled the courtyard stones while you
were rapt, while you were looking for a way
to unite the root and all translations,
imprint the dates, the swallows and the heat,
this communion touching palms to palms.

Let palms inscribe your palms then; let this table
heat in the sun and brand its knot holes through you:
translate away from love — love from away.

Read, Write, Poem talked about specific or specialized vocabulary this week, and about sonnets. I found myself thinking about scientific classifications. Too many people I know have felt classified in unnatural ways and unable to move freely. I don’t think classifications have to bind. A name can give the essence of what’s named, and can change in reaction to what’s named — a name can recognize.

This is a love poem, then. (I’ll put the translations below, for anyone curious.)

Reclassification

When you look up from dishes, flushed with steam,
you are amica blanda. When you pass,
fides baccata, bearing a wet wine glass
wild in reflection from a candle flame

you sing old words and dig the roots and gaze.
Soft down lines your temple. Meadow lark,
alauda mega singing in the dark,
you are the whole creation that you praise.

Rename yourself now. Name your living body.
Anima caronis, name each sinew,
tongue and toe and forehead, palms and lips.

Name every cell and fluid wall within you.
Shiver in frost and darkness, bare before God,
holding out your arms to the eclipse.

* * *
For three days, I have danced my feet sore. Dancing to live music, in a familiar pattern, with several hundred people at all hours of the day is tiring, and blissful, comforting the way all hard exercise is comforting. It clears your head. You can forget time and place in a dance. And at the same time, it is inescapably physical.

You can’t pass through a hundred people’s arms and not be aware of yourself in space, spinning and aching and steadying yourself against their hands. You can’t help feeling the way they move, feeling those who make you comfortable and those who put you off. And you talk by touch. Without speaking (you have no time, and you can’t be heard over the fiddles) you read enjoyment, pressure, confusion, confidence in their hands and bodies, and you decide to match their steps or to assert your own.

It is as clear an illustration as I’ve ever had that mind and body have no clear limits. And every single separation I’ve ever seen has been painful. Lord knows, I wish I knew how to say that in any useful way.

Amica blanda — alluring friend or loved one. (blanda suggests blandishments, not blandness at all.) Latin, like English, seems to need more words for different kinds of love.
fides baccata — fruit-bearing faith
alauda mega — great skylark (mega evokes vastness for me, omega, though I know very little Greek.)
Anima caronis — soul or spirit of the body or flesh.

We were never silent.
We shouted, and we cursed you.
We sang in Arabic in the coffee houses.

We would have deafened your old men
in their red tassels, if they had ever come
in to the streets.

When we left you, we followed the storks
to this place of sand and cinnamon
and the fat of the lamb
to remember over cold mint tea
the thousand stories you will never hear.

And in your desert
a thousand years beyond your death
our walls and waterfalls will speak still.

Why ride a broom with a long, hard handle?
I’ll ride the wind tonight.
As it rushes high and higher
I’ll rise in a lazy, hazy spire
like the smoke of a blown out candle.

If I want the feel of wood, I’ll light
in a living, breathing tree,
an April tree with buds still new
and seed pods streaming wet with dew,
and rock in the wind all night.

This came from my week’s reading: I came across several witch poems that seemed content to talk about gnarled old women on besoms, and after them, I wasn’t.

Clear, soft, supple lines. A beat, and a beat, and a beat again. Rhythm and rhyme so natural they look easy. They’re not easy. I’ve been reading children’s poetry, these last two weeks. The last hundred years have seen many good children’s poems. And I’ve been finding out how many of them are out of print.

Everything I know about poetry began with my giant Child’s Garden of Verses illustrated by Gyo Fujikawa. I still have it, taped together, with two book plates in the front and my name in crayon. The first poem I learned by heart came from it: In winter I get up at night and dress by yellow candlelight….

Stevenson’s poems sound as simple as talking. They have a child’s sense of time and space — the excitement of waiting for the lamp lighter, a city child’s dizzy, rare glimpse of the night sky. A dark hallway goes on forever. A toad stool holds off the rain. A city winds over the rug and jungles grow behind the sofa. These are poems of games and transformations, the feeling of more to find out, the slow time and endless curiosity of a child’s days.

They are simple, but they are not easy, and they tell stories. A good children’s poem reminds me how it feels to stand up to my ankles in mud, to hold a violet against my cheek, to see everything closely. A good children’s poem has other places and times and echoes in it. It knows change will come. It looks at crickets and neighbors and tigers with a sturdy equality.

A good children’s poem is one a child can read. It’s one a child can play with and hold onto and kick around like a tooth-marked rubber ball. That doesn’t mean it has to be nonsense, or plasticene, or tapioca. It can have meanings the child may not puzzle out for years. But it has to speak and let the child talk back.

A year ago, Sharon Ruth Gill wrote that children’s poetry collections now nearly always go back to the classics — How do I love thee and Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day, illustrated in bright watercolors. Some scholars have actually argued that children should only encounter poems by “the masters”.

An illustrated book of sonnets can be beautiful, and if you want to paint one, I’d love to see it. But please, please, don’t try to teach children poetry by making them afraid of it. Don’t tell them only God-fearing geniuses are allowed to write it. Don’t shut it up in glass fronted bookcases behind wing chairs.

Give me instead the woman from NH who brings a program on children’s books into the schools and encourages children to write and illustrate their own. She talks with them about different stories and different words and pictures — what do you like about them, and what do they mean? She lets the kids play with them and flip them like pennies.

Gill has a list of poets she likes, poets who write for children. I’ve been going through it and looking through the local library for writers— Roger McGough, Aileen Fisher. X. J. Kennedy has a collection with some new voices: Talking Like the Rain. Isak Dinesen opens it, telling about an evening she began talking in Swahili verse in a muddy field. The people she spoke to loved the sound. “As they had become used to the idea of poetry,” she said, “they begged: ‘Speak again. Speak like the rain.’”