Polk Street

I don’t remember who chose the shabby tavern
on Polk Street three blocks north of Market,  
only that we landed there afternoons after another  

tedious law school class, lounging at its lacquered
mahogany bar near the square, filthy, street-facing
plate-glass window and its neon MILLERS sign.    

There was the one ancient gimpy bartender coughing
his smoker’s cough in the shadows, and an erratic
overhead flickering from bare-bulb fluorescents,      

and liquor stocks shelved before a mirror reflecting
both a second image of each bottle and our own  
two faces stenciled by the bar’s tinseled, mirrored light.   

No doubt you know a place like it.  There must be  
a thousand places like it.  But no other with my sister
on the high leather stool beside me, lighting up   

a mentholed Newport, sipping her vodka martini,
still droll and sun-blonde, fresh and wicked-clever
and cocky at twenty-eight for all her weaknesses. 

I’d complain about our dull professors.  She would
make me laugh as only she could, turning the hour
privileged and superb, reducing our current troubles

to brief stations we’d glide through effortlessly
together.  Carolyn would do good work in the years
ahead.  She would draft laws still on the books

in California, and before drink took over her life
she made the world better for people.  For many  
people, those who know her work still maintain. 

They say you can’t go back but I ask what matters
more after everything that happens.  My sister slips
a Newport from its box.  I strike a match and watch

the red glow of tobacco igniting as her cigarette
nears my half-cupped hand.  Fruitless maybe, 
yet I go back if only to save a fraction of her liveliness, 

even just the match-light’s flare in her face.  Though
doubtless she’d argue, if she could, that I also return
for last word in what became our life-long debate.

Calling for a fresh martini and swinging back my way
Carolyn cheerfully tries to persuade again that nothing,
not she nor I nor anything else can be saved.