Remembering Paul Newman In Donald Trump’s America

When Paul Newman Was Alive

All night, wind, a pelting of rain, then sump pump songs,
so that by morning I hear the clock of my life as off-then-on
machinery against the backdrop of August rain and everything
about being here now rounded off to the gold of first light in Ohio.
No one is out yet but a neighbor, who retrieves a New York Times
from a driveway. The asphalt is shining about the way it did then,
when Paul Newman was alive and the United States of America
was a good dream we were having about a country, this country.
If last night’s tempest was an army, divisions spent themselves
farther off in the east, over the shallow Licking River; beyond,
white lines of wood smoke emphatically rise into blue-black
like the prodigal smoke from cook fires in a Western movie.
My neighbor is at his door. He closes it, that door he lives
his life behind, as if one storm isn’t the end of the world.