Rabbit, Rabbit.

Rabbit Rabbit. Say it before anything. Coax in all the luck you can. For here is September on a wave of heat. Good-bye summer, pick up your dusty robes and run off.

I am done. Give me a new pencil, a breeze cool enough to bite down on, a photo album to pack up the summer: the parade, the family gathered, berries picked, black-eyed Susans, road trips, rose petals, homecomings, homegoings, shaved ice, warm tomatoes.

At home, wash the slipcovers, hand out leftover popsicles to the first kids you see, shelve the books.

Rabbit Rabbit, September.

As a postscript, here is what I read this summer, worth noting for those who like to read randomly.

The Irish Duo

1. Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan. From a disturbing time in Irish history emerge a dilemma, a hero. A short book, unforgettable. Thank you, Barbara.

2. All Standing: The Remarkable Story of The Jeanie Johnston, The Legendary Irish Famine Ship, Kathryn Miles. I have read quite a lot about the Irish famine years and coffin ships, but here is something new in nonfiction. A carefully designed ship, an impressive crew, good planning, and astute doctors deliver immigrants to America, all standing. Thank you, Lee.

The Fantastic Three

1. The Dylan interview, New Yorker Magazine: In 1964, Journalist Nat Hentoff interviewed Bob Dylan when the latter was 23 years old. The profile was just reprinted in the August 2022 archive issue. In it, Hentoff asks Dylan about the future:

“I don’t look past right now,” he (Dylan) said. “Now there’s this fame business. I know it’s going to go away. It has to. This so-called mass fame comes from people who get caught up in a thing for a while and buy the records. Then they stop. And when they stop, I won’t be famous anymore.”

2. Mantel Pieces: Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books. A book of essays by Hillary Mantel. Witty, intelligent, sometimes irreverent, and always wonderful.

3. “My Emily Dickinson” from Mary Ruefle’s book of collected lectures, Madness, Rack and Honey. To say anything about this is to give something away

The Big Read

The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, José Saramago: Yes, yes and no. Yes, if you are interested in world literature, in a time and place both dated and timeless. Yes, if Portugal is in on your agenda. No, if you are in the mood for something light, because this is a book that asks for knowledge of, or interest in, Portuguese literature and history, and delivers long sentences and seemingly endless paragraphs that take you here, there, and everywhere by way of love affairs, class divides, alienation by choice, art, and poetry.

What makes it all work are Saramago’s enthralling characters: an alter ego, two women and a dead poet. It is worth journeying with them.

Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998. The press release says, he, “who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality.”

Perfect for the summer of 2022.