Poetry Feature: Anonymous
Anonymous
The old Communist behind the bar is decanting
rot-gut red into green bottles, pours me a taste.
He’d fought in Spain with the Lincoln Brigade
and in the big war that followed. He has stories.
Oral history we call it: I want his past, he hopes
for my future. He pours, I drink. So we begin.
Depression days, hunger on the streets, he complains
to a priest who titles him a Communist: his calling.
He won’t speak about battles, nothing of his Silver Star
at Anzio, liberating a Nazi camp. He blesses his luck.
Once he aimed his rifle at an American officer shooting
German POWs but had no qualms about killing the SS.
No poetry lost, he says. Later I find ten-dollar bills
saved in the pages of his favored poets, Blake and Yeats.
When we walk through the zoo admiring caged monkeys,
he talks about a Nuremberg Tribunal for Richard Nixon.
At the ball park, he refuses to stand for the flag.
Cheer up, he chirps, the worst is yet to come.
While sleuthed by the FBI, he persuades an agent
to give him free rides; he can live without a car.
At his job in a mayonnaise factory, he declines
promotions so immigrant workers get better pay.
One night he warns me his comrades are dying fast.
He says, I’ll be seeing you soon—as a ghost.
We scatter his ashes, as he wished, with the fish
outside the Golden Gate where no one could find him.
–Peter Neil Carroll
“Anonymous” was first published in the Chiron Review (Summer 2017).
