Red Wheelbarrow 2008 text FINAL REVISED.indd - De Anza College

looked really dirty but I knocked back a shot of it. We walked along the
pass there and were going towards the vanilla farm and he said, “when I
was a boy my sister at lunch time would come home for lunch along this
path.” It’s like 20 years before, and he said, “But one time she was coming”
because he wanted to jump out and scare her. And he’s waiting and she
comes up and she stops, she doesn’t know he’s there, and she looks behind
her and looks ahead and she takes dog leaps off into the jungle. And he’s
like, oh, what’s she doing? So he tries to tip-toe off and follow her to see
what she’s doing. So he went back out there and carefully looked through
the leaves and he could see her in this little clearing and then there’s this
big, they call it a sausage tree, there’s this big bread fruit-looking stuff.
They’re hanging down by the tips and she went up and took one to her
breast and said, “Bigger, bigger, make it bigger. Bigger, bigger, make it
bigger” (laughter). And then she went away. And he’s a little boy and he
doesn’t know. He’s like, what’s that about? So he went up and did the
same thing. You know, “Bigger, bigger, make it bigger” (laughter). Little
stories like that, and then bigger ones… there’s a wealth of stuff I’d like
to write about. Try to learn from it. Like, what is life like here?
Joann Andrushko: You worked at a screenplay didn’t you?
BT: I was with a friend and he’s still working on that. I sort of just switched
because I got too confused. We were trying to write a comedy about the
North American male. He’s still working on that but he’s shifted his
attention now to a screenplay about chess and history and stuff.
Adam Spohrer: In “Trowel,” can you give us a little background on the
story? Specifically, what is “the lead” in the lines “then burying the lead, its
signatures/ like dirt-filled sockets of bone”? Is it some kind of land mine?
BT: Bullet holes, that’s what I was thinking more of. It could be a land
mine, you know what I mean? It can be any of that stuff really. I remember
watching these two guys at our base—there was this old building that
had pockmarks on it and stuff, from combat. These two guys were adding
onto the wall and trying to make it look the same as it was before. So they
were taking this mud and mixing it, and they were smoothing it on with
this trowel and covering up the marks. It just seemed like an interesting
notion to try and cover over war, but it’s still there. It seems like a negative
and positive thing, like an appeasement. It’s kind of scary to forget, but at
the same time, it’s a coming to terms kind of thing.
And then added with that, I saw these two guys doing this job,
but in the poem I made one of the characters this Iraqi National Guard
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