Tina

                *There is no alternative.*
                        - Margaret Thatcher


I recall she read.  Unemphatic, dogged
pursuit, perhaps of an overview,
in Nietzsche, Simmel, but also people like Ayer -
undeterred by symbolic logic or males.  So
she existed for me, apart from the sex,
which was great though intermittent.  Women I met
in those years seemed to fall into two groups
more strange to each other than men to either;
and she - red hair surprising
against her mother's stocky Tuscan frame -
who could shrug or grin with her eyes
while instantly distinguishing potential
loves from lays and coolly grab the latter,
belonged to the group I liked,

yet was stuck in Oakland.  Stein's remark
is wrong: white wine to the north and east; to the south
and east, innumerable morbid Buds.
Between them, Olde English 800,
shell casings, cotton balls, roach husks,
some grey, nameless fluid.
High-end boutiques she browsed on Peralta failed
however many potted trees they placed,
yet she and they could dream … Student loans,
the first two plausible loves
and subsequent inertia held her
in what she called a job job.
From her room at night, one could see the lights of cranes
shifting and stacking containers at the port.

They met when his crew came in to repair
her office ceiling.  He wasn't one
for shows at the Oakland Museum but invited her.
In bed, he was remarkably tender and abandoned.
He was blond and strong and one inch taller than she.
A shelf in his refrigerator held vials of insulin,
but he mentioned his condition the first date.
Not once, whatever his mood or hers, did he strike
or threaten her, but responded
to explications of Chomsky or Rawls
or the news with the words *Those are Berkeley ideas* and a smile
that - when he told of turning a gun on
the threats of some minority
or union asshole or other -

expanded, his voice shaking, towards joy.
A recession was ending then, a boom beginning.
Dan had an idea and outlined it to her.
They signed and notarized
an agreement.  She quit her job and moved
with him into one apartment, then another
and another at the edge
of a gentrifying district.  Lived in sweat,
the smell of her own breath beneath the filter,
paint chips, his shirts.  Her fine hands
bled.  The rooms were beautiful
when they finished, but that beauty was for others,
who paid.  With the fees from their first seven apartments,
Dan and Tina bought a building, then another

near the art school.  Dan especially disliked
those students.  And in fact, the only segment
on local news about their demonstration
showed barely human, whining, slouching longhairs
living in sties, surrounded by awful art.
The Pacifica station cornered
Tina and got some cold and fierce remarks,
then spoke of alleged rental agreements
and by how large a factor they were broken.
The toneless reporter mangled her last name.
(There are now some lovely older buildings in Oakland
with Starbucks on the corners, or Crate and Barrel.)
With the proceeds, Dan
and Tina etc. etc. for six years.

When I saw her again, she was living
alone in a condo
overlooking a park.  She had grown very fat.
I had grown very fat.  We shared a drink on her balcony
and spoke of the old days, friends.
I was leaving the Bay Area.
She was making up her mind, she said,
to leave.  I saw some decent prints,
and we talked about the San Francisco galleries.
I also noticed books of hers I remembered -
the philosophers of freedom and perception.
They were probably long unopened, but who knows?
Perhaps at evening
she recalls her minor foray beyond good and evil.