Tuscan Sun
for Judy
Eugene A. Melino
Now that she’s gone, I often think
how Judy was like discovering the curvature of the earth,
a way out of the old country,
for me The Bronx, which given all the immigrants there
is a way out of the old country. But I was born here,
my family a lot of old countries: Germany, Italy, Puerto Rico.
Judy was a WASP
DAR, French Huguenots, straight haired and blue eyed,
the opposite of my curly headed, dark skinned, PR mother
but the same left handedness
and both of them born in September.
I’d never have met Judy had it not been for Japan.
I still have that picture of us as grad students in Kyoto,
the sukiyaki dinner her ryokan threw for the Americans that Fourth,
her dress sliding off a sunburned shoulder, her face lit
with a toothy grin like a kid, always happiest anywhere far from home.
Of course it all began with sex. I was young and American
and considered it my birthright,
and hers, too. Isn’t that what they fought the Sexual Revolution for?
We were the Tea Partiers of our time, doing it all night
on the ferry crossing the Inland Sea to Hiroshima,
coming up on deck only to watch the waves flashing like ghosts.
Home only a few months, she put an end to it,
rightly deciding I was too hopelessly wet behind the ears.
But instead of growing up I wrote short stories, and every heroine
in every story I wrote
was an unattainable WASP femme fatale who obsessed my
Hemingwayesque American hero.
I showed them to everyone, especially other girls,
always managing to let on who the inspiration was. Amazingly,
Judy stayed my friend for three decades, long after I stopped writing,
both of us marrying and divorcing other people.
I’m sorry to say she always had to call me. I am a lazy friend,
out of sight out of mind with me, but not with Judy….
My last act of friendship was to paint her upstairs hall
when she got too sick to take care of it herself.
Playing house a little, we chose the color together: Tuscan Sun,
the name cheering her as much as the hue.
How she fretted as I teetered atop the ladder,
determined to get two coats on the high walls above the landing.
You’re crazy, she said, laughing at my derring-do but unable to help,
her legs swollen, her body wrapped in a shawl
like the old woman she would never become, and all the roads I had chosen
lying on the far side of the world.
for Judy
Eugene A. Melino
Now that she’s gone, I often think
how Judy was like discovering the curvature of the earth,
a way out of the old country,
for me The Bronx, which given all the immigrants there
is a way out of the old country. But I was born here,
my family a lot of old countries: Germany, Italy, Puerto Rico.
Judy was a WASP
DAR, French Huguenots, straight haired and blue eyed,
the opposite of my curly headed, dark skinned, PR mother
but the same left handedness
and both of them born in September.
I’d never have met Judy had it not been for Japan.
I still have that picture of us as grad students in Kyoto,
the sukiyaki dinner her ryokan threw for the Americans that Fourth,
her dress sliding off a sunburned shoulder, her face lit
with a toothy grin like a kid, always happiest anywhere far from home.
Of course it all began with sex. I was young and American
and considered it my birthright,
and hers, too. Isn’t that what they fought the Sexual Revolution for?
We were the Tea Partiers of our time, doing it all night
on the ferry crossing the Inland Sea to Hiroshima,
coming up on deck only to watch the waves flashing like ghosts.
Home only a few months, she put an end to it,
rightly deciding I was too hopelessly wet behind the ears.
But instead of growing up I wrote short stories, and every heroine
in every story I wrote
was an unattainable WASP femme fatale who obsessed my
Hemingwayesque American hero.
I showed them to everyone, especially other girls,
always managing to let on who the inspiration was. Amazingly,
Judy stayed my friend for three decades, long after I stopped writing,
both of us marrying and divorcing other people.
I’m sorry to say she always had to call me. I am a lazy friend,
out of sight out of mind with me, but not with Judy….
My last act of friendship was to paint her upstairs hall
when she got too sick to take care of it herself.
Playing house a little, we chose the color together: Tuscan Sun,
the name cheering her as much as the hue.
How she fretted as I teetered atop the ladder,
determined to get two coats on the high walls above the landing.
You’re crazy, she said, laughing at my derring-do but unable to help,
her legs swollen, her body wrapped in a shawl
like the old woman she would never become, and all the roads I had chosen
lying on the far side of the world.
