how bad do you have to be to be struck
by lightning twice?

he is eighty-one, still the same as when
he was twenty-one,
except now he shares a bed with a woman
with the same color hair,
and he cannot hear his children or the
ruby-throated hummingbirds quite as well,
and his hands tremble in the early morning.

the first time it happened, he was fifteen years old
and his brother was seven with fat chipmunk cheeks and bright eyes
everyone loved him after that
the papers called him the selfless teenager
who saved his brother’s life without having
to sacrifice his own
but he knew it wasn’t true because there had been times when he had refused to share his candy with his brother
and times when he thought his hand could teach
a better lesson than his words
women followed him around for years, but even that stopped.

the second time it happened, he was fifty-three years old and just as quick
he had managed to escape Oklahoma after all,
but his wife missed the smell of rural land
and he followed her home
everyone pitied him after that
his mother cried into a journalist’s microphone and asked, “how much pain does one man
have to endure?”
he could not get the scent of burnt memories
out of his hair for weeks.

he is afraid of fire now, and his wife hates it
she tells him that it is time to forgive himself
it’s been thirty years, she mutters
but he is good to her and he is patient and
he is kind
and even when he is sad or angry, he does not take it out on her the way her other men used to.

the best people in life are the ones who have
suffered catastrophes too terrible to name.