* I come walking across a winter heath with a rainbow arching through gray skies above me. Sharply there comes a splintering crack, like ice breaking on a spring river, and I look up to see half the rainbow hanging down from the other half like a twisted limb. Once imprisoned colors begin to spill down, blues that change the sky’s hue to summer, greens that make me think of bare feet in deep grass, then yellows and oranges that sundown the world. Last come the reds, pouring out like angry blood.
When the rainbow is empty it hangs like a crystal holograph in the sky, until it cracks again and tumbles madly in pieces to the ground. I go on across the heath, through colors that clump and cling like mud to my boots, until I find where the rainbow has fallen. It lies in chunks, like twisted boxcars from a wrecked train.
I enter the first such “car,” and then the next and the next, to find piled within all the garbage that the human race has thrown away over the years: one tennis shoe without laces, a broken tin top, sandwich wrappers, a rusted out stove, a chair with the cane back smashed in, nylons with the toes stripped, clothes stained with tobacco and oil. Further along through the fallen rainbow are older discards: gnawed bones, a misshapen flint, a shattered spear.
When I come to the last section of the rainbow, I cannot enter. I can see dimly through to the other end, and outside stands my house, the goal I have been tramping across the heather to reach. But shadows roil in the space before me, between where I stand and where I want to be. The breeze dies when it enters that place. But something moves. Something lives. I see need the color of black. I hear rage like a pressure against my ears. Something waits, but cannot control itself enough to wait silently. That is its downfall.
I turn and trudge back the long way through the trash.
* This is an actual dream I had quite a few years ago. I’ve tried before to capture it in prose, have tried in poetry. Nothing quite works, but it was certainly an interesting dream.
