When my grandmother left the house
to live with my aunts, my grandfather,
who spent so much time in the sugar
cane fields, returned daily to the emptiness

of the clapboard house he built
with his own hands, and he sat in the dark
to eat beans he cooked right in the can.
There in the half-light he thought of all he'd lost,

including family, country, land, sometimes
he slept upright on that same chair,
only stirred awake by the restlessness
of his horse. One night during a lightning

storm, my grandfather stripped naked
and walked out into the fields around
the house saying 'que me parta un rayo,'
may lightning strike me, and he stood

with his arms out, the hard rain pelted
his face, and then the lightning fell
about him, and he danced and cradled
lightning bolts in his arms, but they

kept falling, these flashes of white light,
and he ran back inside and brought out
an armful of large mason jars my grandmother
used for pickling, and he filled them

with fractal light. Like babies, he carried
the jars inside and set them all about the house,
and the house filled with the immense
blinding light that swallowed everything

including the memories of how each nail
sunk into the wood, the water level rose
in the well, the loss of this country,
the family who refused to accept him now,

that in this perpetual waking, the world
belonged to those who believed in the power
of electricity, those moments zapped
of anguish, isolation, this clean and pure

act of snatching lightning out of heavy air,
plucking lightning like flowers from a hillside.