Meaning        I first heard this story about forty years ago. It still occurs to me from time to time.        Prisoners in Russia, or maybe it was Africa, had to work a diamond mine, or maybe it was an emerald mine. No matter. They worked in their rags in that cold or heat until exhausted. And each night, leaving the mine, they were subjected to a thorough search.        Every night, one miner — we'll call him X — pushing a wheelbarrow filled with straw, approached the guard. The guard stopped him, frisked him, patted him down, checked under the wheelbarrow, sifted through the straw for any indication of ore or gemstones or other valuables. Nothing. The guard was sure that one of these nights he'd have X by the nuts, but every night X pushed his straw to the checkpoint, and every night the conscientious guard, arm of the party in power, searched him and came up empty. This went on for months. One night the guard even burned the straw and sifted through the ashes. Nothing.        The scene shifts, liberation, that war is over. . .        It so happens that years later X is having a beer, maybe in a pub in London or in a cellar in Berlin. We knew this would happen: the same guard from out of his past is there, and they recognize one another. At first they are suspicious and careful — all those memories, resentments, griefs — but then find out that they are just two men trying to get on in the world. A few beers later, the guard lets down his guard and asks X once and for all, "Tell me now, please, I know you were getting away with something, I know you were finding some way to outwit us, night after night with your wheelbarrow filled with straw, though I could never catch you, you can tell me now, what it is you were stealing?"        "Wheelbarrows," X replied. William Heyen Pig Notes & Dumb Music: Prose on Poetry BOA Editions, Ltd. Copyright © 1998 by William Heyen. All rights reserved. Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.