September 1: Nighttime Winkings, Teaching and Working, a Little Beauty

One of the true things was his first evening in the slaughterhouse.  He and poor old Edgar Derby were pushing an empty two-wheeled cart down a dirt lane between empty pens for animals.  They were going to a communal kitchen for supper for all.  They were guarded by a sixteen-year-old German named Werner Gluck.  The axles of the cart were greased with the fat of dead animals.  So it goes.

The sun had just gone down, and its afterglow was backlighting the city, which formed low cliffs around the bucolic void to the idle stockyards.  The city was blacked out because bombers might come, so Billy didn't get to see Dresden do one of the most cheerful things a city is capable of doing when the sun goes down, which is to wink its lights on one by one.

There was a broad river to reflect those lights, which would have made their nighttime winkings very pretty indeed.  It was the Elbe.

Billy is in the hospital, recovering from brain surgery after his airplane crashed into the side of a mountain.  He's drifting in-and-out of dreams and reality, jumping back and forth in time.  He can't really tell which is which.

I don't have a whole lot of energy this evening.  It has been a long week of teaching and working.  I'm pretty beat.  I'm sure that I'll be crashing tonight, sitting on the couch, drifting in and out of sleep, like Billy.

This is the last real weekend of the summer.  Labor Day in the United States.  Don't have to go back to work until next Tuesday.  Don't teach until next Wednesday.  Of course, I have a lot of lesson planning and grading to do over the next few days.  I'm going to try to relax a little bit, too.

Tonight, however, I'm going to work on a new poem.  A poem for a wedding that I'm going to on Sunday.  I've been working on the poem for a couple of weeks now.  As usual, it feels as if I'm never going to get it done on time.  But I will.

Saint Marty is ready to find a little beauty tonight.